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NYTimes recently had an article on penmanship. Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl. I'd explain why, but the article does it so much better.

I think the idea that the article you cite misses is that cursive is fast. If you want to write beautifully legible cursive, you can slow it down; if you want to write quickly, you can speed it up with a minimum of loss of comprehension. Try writing quickly in that italics script they suggest! ... it'd drive anyone nuts.

I'd also point out that they use a horribly misformed example of cursive (with a particularly bad word, "believe") next to their perfectly formed italic script example. This is neither a fair, open or sensible comparison (which probably explains why the article in question is published in a newspaper rather than a peer-reviewed journal.) I've never seen anyone write cursive even remotely as ugly as that one example! (and if kids are really writing like that, then that suggests not that cursive is inherrently bad, but more that they're not being taught cursive properly. Cursive doesn't have to, and certainly shouldn't, look like that ...)

NYTimes recently had an article on penmanship. Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl. I'd explain why, but the article does it so much better.

Wikinews: Suicide bomber kills 30 in northwest Pakistan

Sources?

"Deadly blast in Pakistan market". Al Jazeera, September 18, 2009
Pir Zubair Shah "Suicide Blast Kills 30 in Pakistan". New York Times, September 18, 2009

Who paid for it? It wasn't free.

I am totally against protectionist policies because it never works. You have to understand that we get our water from outside California. We get it from the Colorado River, for instance. Why can we get the water from the Colorado River but we can't get renewable energy from outside the state? We get most of our cars from outside the state; why can't we get renewable energy?

With Reuters outlining some challenges. Aside from that, you have some groups like the CEA speaking out against it and a surprisingly negative response from the California citizens for smart clean energy claiming that it cuts jobs for citizens. A rep from them said:

We all believe in the importance of energy efficiency, but the CEC's proposed regulation is simply bad policy that will do little to achieve energy efficiency and a lot to destroy California jobs. The consumer electronics industry has been trying to work with the CEC since day one on alternatives that would help achieve energy efficiency without causing undue harm on California's economy. But time and time again, we have been disappointed with the CEC's approach and process.

Well, apparently British libel law allows libel suits against people who aren't British posting to servers which aren't in Britain. So why shouldn't the opposite be true as well?

The administration is forecasting a $9 Trillion budget deficit within ten years, a figure the Congressional Budget Office agrees with.

It's a $9 trillion deficit over ten years, not within ten years.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iWWPT8cAUpUCsmOZoABze-6XhwTAD9ALBNU00

We're in the deepest recession since 1930, and have run up $1.38 Trillion in debt, people- and that's not all from the two wars we're fighting.

The administration is forecasting a $9 Trillion budget deficit within ten years, a figure the Congressional Budget Office agrees with.

"Only $3BN more" you say? That's a +15% increase of NASA's budget. "Oh, only 15%", you say. Well, guess what happens after 1000 federal agencies and projects have come to you asking for "only 15% more"? I can't even find a figure for the number of items in the federal budget, but I'm guessing it falls around 10,000 or more.

Yes, military spending is an order of magnitude larger. That is not an excuse to increase spending for another agency; it is a reason to reduce military spending. That is something that is not easily done, given how dependent our country has become on military spending to employ people, and congresscritters are very allergic to "defense" cuts in their district.

We need to be trimming from the federal budget, not adding to it any more, except for the most critical needs. Space exploration, while fascinating and a great boost for nationalism, is not a critical need.

Nuclear power is an amazing technology that would solve many of the world's power problems

In a free market Wall Street would not finance nuclear power, the Nuclear Power Industry is "Hooked on Subsidies". Notice what that article even says of other nations "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors." In Finland Olkiluoto 3, being built by the French government owned Areva and Siemens so there is no lack of experience, is 3 year behind schedule and "about $2.4bn dollars (1.7bn euros) over budget."

"In Flamanville, France, a clone of the Finnish reactor now under construction is also behind schedule and overbudget."

"In the United States, Florida and Georgia have changed state laws to raise electricity rates so that consumers will foot some of the bill for new nuclear plants in advance, before construction even begins."

In a free market you don't pay for what you don't use, and it would give you choices as to who supplies you. I'd rather pay a little extra for electricity from a solar or wind farm than I would to be forced to pay for nuclear power.

Oh and solar as well as wind can provide a lot of energy, in the US and Canada, with geothermal serving as a baseload.

They're fighting it because the morons of the world will think that irradiation makes the food dangerous.

Some people are quite rationally concerned because there have been no long term studies on the effects of microwaves on plants, or people, yet studies have shown microwaves can alter DNA.

Falcon

Of course, if technologically enabled warrantless snooping is okay, they could track which subway entrances were used to determine where you've been. In the linked case, tracking confirmed an alibi. But it could just as easily be used for fishing expeditions if not confined to the scope of a warrant based on probable cause.

Actually, the Clean Water Act regulates over a hundred water pollutants and if you want to know what is in your water, you can check this compilation from the New York Times, as well as their very good articles about water toxicity. Funny thing: yesterday I accessed both articles directly, today they are requiring free registration. I think it is still worth it.

Actually, the Clean Water Act regulates over a hundred water pollutants and if you want to know what is in your water, you can check this compilation from the New York Times, as well as their very good articles about water toxicity. Funny thing: yesterday I accessed both articles directly, today they are requiring free registration. I think it is still worth it.

Now you are also wrong about the findings a court makes. It does not find that a violation of a law happened, the find that it's possible it happened and the case determines if it happened or not. Often, after the court has taken testimony and tried the facts, it is determined that a law was not broken.

I really don't know why I discuss things with you, as you've repeatedly demonstrated you're as dumb as a post.

Courts, before they listen to any facts, they determine whether or not it would constitute a violation of the law if those facts proved what the prosecutor wanted. There is something called a question of law, which is entirely distinct from the question of facts which is the trial itself.

As an example you may be able to understand, let us say the police arrest me for turning right on a red light. In some jurisdictions, where that is illegal, there would actually be a case there, where people would introduce evidence and witnesses.

In other places, where that is legal, the case would be thrown on the finding of law that such behavior is not actually illegal, regardless of what I actually did or didn't do. The person's 'guilt' or 'innocence' doesn't enter into it, because said behavior isn't actually a crime.

Now, hold that thought, and let's get back to what you said. And I'll quote 'Not one creditable judge has said the wire taping was illegal'.

Judges can, in fact, do that. They can say something isn't a crime. That would be a finding of law. They can stand there and say 'The behavior that this person is accused of is not a crime, case dismissed.'. They do this first, before any evidence is presented. (Because, obviously, it doesn't depend on any evidence.)

They did not do that in this case. They got past that little hurdle, and then threw out the case due to lack of evidence. (Strictly speaking, it was lack of evidence of standing, not lack of evidence of the crime itself, but that amounts to the same thing here.)

In other words, according to the court, the US government has not been proven to have done specific acts which the courts thinks would be illegal. They said, quite clearly to anyone who knows that the slightest bit about courts, that they think that behavior might be illegal but that it cannot be proven the government actually did it.

Incidentally, your claim that the judge who originally found them guilty was operating in an unprofessional manner is idiotic.

The first judge found them guilty because he accepted, into evidence, a document that the government had mistakenly given the ACLU demonstrating that the person in the suit was wiretapped.

On appeal, another judge refused to let that be entered as evidence, allowing the government to claim 'national security' for a document already publically published, and hence the ACLU had no evidence of the wiretapping.

You're arguing that it is incorrect behavior for judges to admit documents into evidence.

Now congress believed the president had this power constitutionally in 1967-68, so how did it disappear without any constitutional amendments?

'Congress' is not in charge of what constitutional powers the president has, you moron. The Constitution is.

Now, I like the way you attempted to phrase this whole phone tap business as openly as possible to make it appear that the government was listening to you tell Aunt Betty, mom's cookie recipe, but the reality of it is a lot different. The phone taps were only on people who were in contact with known terrorist and one end of the phone call was from outside the country. No one who has had any insight into the program, and yes, that includes democrats too, has ever made the claim otherwise.

Yeah, no one's suggested tha

people are paranoid often. People are paranoid about their kids all the time. The information about your kids heart rate is insignificant. If you are worried about information coming back to haunt your kids, look at the 80 txt msgs per day that they are sending or the crazy stuff they put on mytubes, facespace, and all over the rest of the internets.

Why do middle school kids need an HRM anyway?

...this is only going to be true where the water isn't properly sanitized. Most US systems are designed to have residual chlorine all the way to delivery...

The NY Times version of the same article says, "[Mycobacterium] avium tends to be a particular problem in municipal water supplies, Dr. Pace said. The reason is that cities treat their water with chlorine, a poison that kills most bacteria but gives avium a selective advantage."

Uh no. Chlorine is not as effective on that bacteria, and actually that's why it and not other bacteria that tends to be there :).

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15shower.html

"M. avium tends to be a particular problem in municipal water supplies, Dr. Pace said. The reason is that cities treat their water with chlorine, a poison that kills most bacteria but gives avium a selective advantage."

This NY Times article includes a photo of Doug Cutting, Hadoop's creator (and now Cloudera employee), holding his son's toy elephant, Hadoop.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/what-to-do-if-you-saw-an-antivirus-pop-up-ad/?hp

The story is somewhat weak. It suggests running Avast and MS Malicious Software Removal Tool.

I challenge you to name one Austrian economist who predicted our current economic crisis. In fact, the free-marketeers who worship Friedman (I know that's Chicago school, not Austrian, but bear with me) ignored the potential for the current crisis while Keynesians like Krugman, in point of fact, predicted it. And Keynesianism hasn't been mainstream (in the US) for decades, so I don't know where you're getting the idea to say "the more mainstream Keynesians". The trend has been to trust markets more and more, and the very deregulation that the Greenspans and Bernankes of the world championed created the crisis on a fundamental level.
( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?_r=1 is one of many good articles on this subject)

Besides which, Austrian economics claims to deduce all of economics a priori, which fundamentally contradicts your premise that it takes account of human behavior. Human behavior is known a posteriori from observing humans. If some "a priori" deduction about human behavior contradicts empirical observation of human behavior, then we must conclude the a priori deduction describes not human behavior but some abstract concept of how a human ought to behave. Likewise, Austrian school economics is powerless to describe a real economy, because when it contradicts empirical observation, it says, in essence, "fie upon empirical observation!", but by doing so, describes not a real economy but an abstract conception of how economies should behave

And you didn't need to be omniscient to see that government policy (keeping interest rates extremely low) was leading to a misallocation of investment funds into real estate.

But it was the Keynesians who wanted the rates pushed so low to begin with. Paul Krugman, for example, explicitly called for a housing bubble in 2002:

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

You are quoting Krugman seriously out of context. One, he did not "call for" a bubble, he mentioned another guy calling for it. Two, even the guy he quoted was most likely not in favor of replacing one bubble with another, but criticizing it. Three, the same Krugman article makes his criticism of Fed&Treasury policy, if only one bothers to read the conclusion of his op-ed.

Actually, irrationality in finance is not only prominent, it's rampant. It was certainly at play in this latest bubble and burst. For example, most bankers peddling the toxic CDOs were using a model that relied on only about ten years of economic data. This is the byproduct of the Availability Heuristic. Additionally, their models often excluded the possibility of such a huge decline in housing prices because there had never been one like it before. The Representativeness Heuristic induces this kind of behavior, in spite of the warnings from others.

None of this is rational behavior. The idea you proposed that this is some sort of Prisoner's Dilemma situation ignores the fact that there are two sides to every transaction. Any of the people who rationally cashed out did it with the money of the irrational people buying their toxic instruments. The Prisoner's Dilemma falls short as an analogue because it doesn't require a buyer for the players to make their decisions. No one has to take the other side of their decisions, which is the case in a market.

For a great review of the hundreds of ways we behave irrationally in financial markets, I highly recommend BehaviouralFinance.net.

I thought this Paul Krugman article, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? " was particularly insightful. But if you're off the mind that all economics philosophies got it wrong recently, you might not be too interested in it. The subtitle is, "Mistaking Beauty for Truth."

And you didn't need to be omniscient to see that government policy (keeping interest rates extremely low) was leading to a misallocation of investment funds into real estate.

But it was the Keynesians who wanted the rates pushed so low to begin with. Paul Krugman, for example, explicitly called for a housing bubble in 2002:

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

The Keynesians MADE this mess. It's not exactly a vote of confidence to say "well, a few of them weren't ENTIRELY blind to the consequences."

We all know that modelling human behaviour in software is anything but a trivial task, and that the results have to be taken with quite a grain of salt, but that's a step in the right direction, because for the last few decades economists have considered the market players to be perfectly reasonable, rational and competent, assuming little to no chaos in what actually goes on. If this crisis did anything good, it's given a much needed reality check to economists, particularly west of the Atlantic. I read a great piece on the topic by the way.

There's also something I love about these economists who come up with Nobel prize-worthy equations but fail to see the elephant in the room that is making all these weird assumptions about how markets work. I think of them as smart fools, they're extremely intelligent, but never take a step back to see where they're going. They do very futile and dumb things, but in an extremely sophisticated and brilliant manner. And because they know they're extremely smart and experts in their field, they reject any notion that despite that intellect and expertise they might be fools. Anyone with any common sense and education could see the caveats of what they do, but everybody knows that these guys are smarter than us and experts, so they must be right, even if it's blatantly foolish. This applies to string theorists as well by the way, to a lesser extent.

"How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? "

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=all

Corret one.

The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash -- $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return -- though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

Keep in mind that these things will be securitized, tranched, and then the pieces will be securitized and tranched, greatly magnifying the risk. On top of that, there will be a new, brisk trade in various hedges on these instruments, including the infamous credit default swaps. In this way, a tiny diseases market can metastasize throughout the economy.

The thing to get excited about here is not the efficiency of the fuel but that this is supposedly a "cradle to cradle" solution. By producing this fuel you are not taking away farmland to decrease possible food production but you are taking the CO2 out of the air to produce the fuel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/us/02algae.html?_r=2&oref=slogin

An algae farm could be located almost anywhere. It would not require converting cropland from food production to energy production. It could use sea water and could consume pollutants from sewage and power plants.

GPS Theft - Very Common Occurance

This story of GPS disappearing within 1-hour of leaving it in a car is something that I hear very often from many people who I have personally known to have their cars broken into because of this. Just two weeks ago a friend of mine took his GPS with him but left the sticky window mount in the car and his car was broken into and searched for the GPS but he had it with him.

Stolen Item = Revenue Restart

I'm surprised that Amazon doesn't just disassociate the user's account from the device until he buys a new one, and leave the lost or stolen device as available for new activation by the new person who finds it or steals it. Knowing Amazon's business ethics it would be profitable for them to active these missing devices to new users to restart the revenue stream from these users purchasing new books with their new accounts. As long as they don't tell anyone and nobody gets access to their information they should be good to go with this plan. Until someone rats them out for activating stolen devices, but who's going to prosecute them or fine them?

Misunderstanding Police - They're NOT Here To Help You

It seems that you are one of the many people here who misunderstand the purpose of Police and believe that they are an agency to aid individuals-in-need like yourself. The Police are not here to help individuals they are here to uphold the law for the common good of society as a whole. They deal with crime and apply the law en-mass to prevent the communities that they are based in from falling into chaos. It only appears that they deal with individual cases to the people involved and those who fail to see the big picture of how the Police apply their efforts to trim certain crime outbreaks down to manageable levels before focusing on other areas.

Even the US Supreme Court ruled that they police do not have to protect you as an individual from certain and imminent deadly harm because that is up to their discretion. So if the Police don't have to save your life why would they care about saving your property?

NY Times - [US] Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: June 28, 2005

Take a good look at a Police officer tomorrow when you see one and try to realize that his job is to protect the community and society and that he has full discretion backed by the highest court in the land to watch you get killed or your property taken without having the obligation to help you in any way shape or form. When you come to this realization that not even the Police are here to help you, you will start learning and appreciating personal independence and you will start taking better care for your personal safety, freedom, and your property. The idea of taking responsibility for your own actions and more importantly, the ability to imagine future outcomes of your actions will start coming to you when you break out of the fog thinking that there will be help available anytime you need it. Learn to help yourself first.

My Lost Full GPS Enabled Cell Phone Experience

My wife left her Sprint HTC Mogul (PPC-6800) that has a full GPS enabled receiver in a bathroom at Universal Studios Florida. Within 30-minutes we contacted park authorities who came to the bathroom to investigate only to find that the purse and phone were missing. The office on duty said that the most common outcome is that the cash money is taken out of the purses or wallets and they are discarded into the trash cans to hide the evidence. They contacted the cleaning crew right away by radio but were told that the garbage was already taken out and cleared out to the back. My wife's phone was turned on in the purse so it was active. Calling it gave the standard 4-rings then voice mail response confirming that it was still operational and powered on, otherwise it would be 1

The mice are trying to float a loan to start a Swiss account. BTW They prefer gumdrops http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0F1FF83F5E107A93C6A91782D85F4D8485F9

THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE BIOTERROR THREAT; Iraq Links Germs for Weapons to U.S. and France

Report Links Gulf War Expert to U.S. Supplier of Germs to Iraq

Senator Says U.S. Let Iraq Get Lethal Viruses

THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE BIOTERROR THREAT; Iraq Links Germs for Weapons to U.S. and France

Report Links Gulf War Expert to U.S. Supplier of Germs to Iraq

Senator Says U.S. Let Iraq Get Lethal Viruses

THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE BIOTERROR THREAT; Iraq Links Germs for Weapons to U.S. and France

Report Links Gulf War Expert to U.S. Supplier of Germs to Iraq

Senator Says U.S. Let Iraq Get Lethal Viruses

Citation needed

The article I read says they were planning on using hydrogen peroxide as the explosive.

WTF? Were they going to plant a paper-mache volcano in the passenger cabin?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?_r=1

You're not rational, the people you work with are not rational and the people you work for are not rational.

The article I read says they were planning on using hydrogen peroxide as the explosive. I didn't trust my memory of chemistry so I looked it up. Seems to me that H2O2 is an oxidizer, not a rocket fuel (unless you spray a catalyst with it to get steam & O2). Also seems to me that this wouldn't work so well.

Solar Thermal works right now.

The Solar Furnace in France melts steel in seconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace

SEGs has been online for years making 354 Megawatts of power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems

The Solar Tower is the cheapest method to build at this point,
and with molten salt storage can get near 60% efficiency.

Photovoltaic is not the best way to go.

A massive version of this is being planned for North Africa to power
most of Europe.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/european-solar-power-from-african-deserts/

According to WallStats, NASA's funding for 2010 is $18.7 billion. According to The New York Times, the amount of bailout funds committed by the U.S. Government to Bear Stearns and AIG (both of which are fraudulent companies) is $82 billion. That is 4.4 times the amount of funding that NASA is receiving next year. If the manned space program is canceled, let it be known that it was due to debacles such as this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/global/06lego.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=all

Try this link.

Yet you're perfectly ok with people being able to allow knives, which are infinitely more dangerous? Glad I don't like in the U.K.

As a matter of fact, Britain is in fact enacting 'knife control'.

British Medical Experts Campaign for Long, Pointy Knife Control

Britain Cracks Down on Knives After 11th Teen Is Slain in London

War on Knives

Statistics on Knife Crime in Britain

Just try googling for "knife control in britain" and you'll find lots of stories on the subject.

The funniest thing about my comment having been moderated troll is that I subsequently learned that the grandparent was straight up wrong. The books had been sold legally and the publisher just changed their mind. Read through the other thread and you'll see that this misunderstanding about an illegal sale grew up and Amazon never confirmed it (so it wasn't true) but they carefully didn't contradict it.

It is also a fairly logical implementation, with cheap off-the-shelf technology, of a standard treatment for PTSD.

So called "exposure therapy" or "prolonged exposure therapy", where the patient is exposed under controlled conditions to the stimuli that frighten them is a standard(and, according to available research, fairly effective) PTSD treatment. It is also used for some anxiety disorders and phobias.

There has been some previous work with using simulations for the purpose(since "controlled environment" and "insurgents with RPGs" are not especially compatible in real life). Doing it in second life would just be the cheaper, easier, more anonymous version.

Probably not as good as the full scale equivalent; but it seems like a useful application of 80/20. If, for basically nothing per patient, you can offer help to people who don't want to see a psychiatrist or aren't within driving distance of a psychiatrist, or who don't have access to the specialized VR setups, you'll still likely improve the lot of the patient population as a whole.

It's not just freshman classes that subsidize the more expensive offerings. Humanities courses cost less than sciences but are billed at the same rate, so English departments subsidize more costly departments. The people in these institutions are uncomfortable talking about who subsidizes whom. In business, the criterion is simple: make your unit profitable or it dies. Colleges have been unwilling to live by that. As a result, programs aren't cut and tuition only goes up. But as we know, unsustainable trends cannot be sustained indefinitely. The brightest minds no doubt will continue to get free rides to places like Harvard, but I suspect that some other bright minds are at work on creative ways to get tuition within reach for those who have to pay their own way.

money buys justice. But this is the age of the internet, where information is everywhere and nobody reads anything. So "word" is obsolete. All we need is YouTube!

I think you're missing a key detail, that the books were pulled because the SELLER (that is: not Amazon) was selling the books illegally via Amazon.

You are mistaken. The publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic version. The copies were sold legitimately from a publisher with the rights to do so. Linky.

The NYPL is doing something similar. President Paul LeClerc got a ton of money from wealthy contributors, and he's de-emphasizing the print collection and boosting the digital collections.

The signature example of that was selling the Donnell Library on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/arts/design/07nypl.html The Donnell was a landmark library for 50 years, that people grew up with, and a magnet for teenage science nerds, poetry fans, etc., from around the City and neighboring suburbs. They had the best collection of science books for children and teenagers I've ever seen, and one of the first record and film collections. LeClerc made a deal with a hotel to tear down the Donnell Library (which he's already done) and build a hotel in its place, with a library half the size in the basement (that part of the deal fell through with the financial crisis). The theory was that the new library wouldn't need as many books, because it would have a big digital collection.

In general, LeClerc is leading the NYPL to build up its digital collection at the expense of the paper collection. This is good in some ways, if I want to look something up in their digital newspaper collection, or some of their digital science and technology journals. It's bad in other ways, since most of the major medical journals I want to read are too expensive for them to subscribe to online. (Most journals charge libraries a fee based on the number of students and faculty in their school, and a NYPL librarian told me that the New England Journal of Medicine would charge them a fee based on the entire population of New York.)

With infinite money (or far enough in the future), a digital collection could be as good as or better than a paper collection for most (but not all) purposes, and might be better overall. But with the money and technology they have now, a digital collection loses an awful lot.

The librarians told me that the Donnell had special collections, such as foreign language collections in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Yiddish (!), and every language they speak in New York -- more languages than Google. When they closed the Donnell, they broke up the collection, and most of the books were just thrown out as garbage. (I once looked up some books from the 1960s in Spanish on Mexican murals. When Isaac Bashevits Singer won the Nobel Prize, I looked up some of his Yiddish short stories and struggled through them with my German and Hebrew.)

In the 1980s, I worked for McGraw-Hill, and one of the best things about that company was that I could use the McGraw-Hill library. McGraw-Hill published about 50 business and technical magazines in the electrical, mining, machining, chemical, aerospace and I forgot what other industries. They had files of trade magazines going back to 1917, with standard reference books for every industry, and a book division with elementary, high school and college textbooks (think Samuelson's Economics), and classic business and technical books. They also had a great journalism collection. The guys who built the electrical industry in the 1930s wrote articles about it for McGraw-Hill magazines. You could stand in front of the bookshelf on that industry and get a good idea of what the industry was all about.

The top management was really pushing computerization. They decided to throw out all the books and magazines and replace them with Nexis and other databases (because the McGraw-Hill magazines were on Nexis, they got a special deal). Realize that this was a publishing company, whose employees had dedicated their lives to books. Instead of getting a book or magazine, all you could get was 20-page printouts (dot matrix, no pictures). We used to refer to it as the Alexandrian Library at McGraw-Hill.

I would agree that you're in bad need of facts.

Here you go, fresh hot facts to whack your noodle!

A study that shows that "The United States has by far the most expensive health care system in the world". The US is spending per capita is $4,178, while the next runner up is Switzerland at $2,794. That's a whole 1/3rd cheaper!

This article says that the US ranked 37th in a WHO effort to rank health care systems, whereas socialist France was ranked #1, Italy #2.

"The U.S. health care delivery system is by far the costliest on the planet, but comparison studies consistently show Americans get second-rate results by nearly every benchmark.

Here's another article: "But for most all the rest of us, measured by all basic health care outcomes, from infant mortality rates to life expectancy, the United States has steadily fallen from number one in the world to the back of the pack of industrialized nations. The World Health Organization now ranks the U.S. health care system in 42nd place compared to all other countries."

You're not really trying, are you?

There have been many attempts of late to greenwash coal, this solar project and the "clean coal" concepts being the most recent incarnation. Even if 100% of coal plants can be made 100% carbon neutral, where do they get the coal from?

in December 2008, a 40 acre ash pond in tennessee broke through its walls and flooded millions of gallons of coal ash, potentially far worse than the Exxon Valdez. This is one of the largest environmental disasters that has happened in the US, and there has been little to no national coverage about this accident.

There are a lot of heavy hitters in the coal industry that want to put the best possible face on coal (e.g. Montana), and it is alarming that 'mountaintop removal', the laziest way to get coal, is frequently not discussed when considering how green a coal plant can be.

The decision by the European Commission to extend its investigation into the deal, worth $7.4 million, is especially sensitive because the U.S. Department of Justice has already approved the merger. Regulators in the United States questioned Oracle's market power in some areas of its business but raised fewer concerns than the Europeans about open-source software.

In announcing the decision, Neelie Kroes, the European Union's competition commissioner, appeared to signal a different approach Thursday, warning that the acquisition could hamper development of an important software product owned by Sun, which specializes in computer hardware. The product, MySQL, is the most widely used corporate database software in the world, and it competes with products produced by Oracle.

...

"Europeans still have a lot more concerns than Americans about companies using strong or dominant positions to create a bottlenecks for competitors in the information and technology sectors," said Peter Alexiadis, a partner at the law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, who is based in Brussels.

"Any whiff of dominance over different platforms used to deliver information raises particular concerns," he said. "This may in part explain why Europeans, who are used to multiple business traditions, might be less inclined to view Oracleâ(TM)s traditional strengths in databases as not posing competitive concerns."

From E.U. to Review Oracle's Takeover of Sun Microsystems