If you start knowing that “Wealthier people derive more of their income from returns on saving—both in dollar terms and as a proportion of income—than poor people do.” You can quickly guess what Bush’s economic policy might be: The nation’s current economic policy came to Washington in care of R. Glenn Hubbard and Lawrence B. [...]
Keeth Smart that is. He is the first U.S. Saber fencer to be ranked #1 in the world. This isn’t going to be like his coach Peter Westbrook, who won a medal because the Soviets boycotted the Olympics. He has a real chance at winning, even if he still has to hold down a day [...]
I wanted to clarify a comment I left in my post on Koko, the guerilla whose learned to use symbols to communicate with humans. I wrote the following: I think both language and intelligence are really catch-all terms that cover a wide range of interrelated skills. So it isn’t a matter of animals standing somewhere [...]
Because when you think “Superman,” you think “dancing girls.” More at Shaswati’s blog and the Sepia Mutiny. Meanwhile, will Christ play Superman?
Bill Poser explains why a news story about how Koko, the gorilla, used American Sign Language (ASL) to tell her caretakers that she needed a visit by the dentist tells us more about the limits of animal communication than it does about the wonders of animal communication: Unlike many animal language stories, this one seems [...]
I’ve long been reading the multilingual blog, Blogalization, so I was very interested to read this article by one of its founders, Ethan Zuckerman, discussing the role of blogging in the developing world: When journalists don’t cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar – they have no signal to [...]
Syndicate your schedule! I’ve long been using PHP iCalendar which allows me to sync my iCal Calendar without using an expensive .Mac account, and also offers RSS feeds for individual calendars! But I haven’t included this in my ongoing efforts to build a list of uses for RSS feeds because this seemed like a Mac-only [...]
Jacob Hacker has a sort of preview of his next book in The New Republic, and I think he is most clearly saying the big thing that needs to be said about the economy: That the principal problem, the big thing that has changed, is not the number of jobs, the rate of growth, or [...]
Via Nathan Newman, an important article on the legal threat to use of card checks for union organizing and media coverage of the issue. What is Card Check? Card check is a procedure under which an employer recognizes a union when presented with signed cards in favor of joining a union from over 50 percent [...]
I always like looking at what web searches lead people to my blog. This is certainly the strangest one I’ve ever seen. Someone used MSN’s search engine to look for the following phrase: what is the ritual for chinese frog I had never heard of any such ritual, not to mention blogged about it, but [...]