From Matt Asay’s “Words to live by“:
This was one of the few things I learned at Stanford Law School: you never want to have to enforce a contract, because the clear interpretation of a contract becomes much less clear the minute both sides stop agreeing on that interpretation.
Good advice re: contracts Read More »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Should Terrorism be Reported in the News?” in Crypto-Gram (15 May 2005):
One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, “news” means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it’s probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported — automobile deaths, domestic violence — when it’s so common that it’s not news, then you should start worrying.
How to know if you should worry Read More »
From BBC News:
In fact, it turns out that images stored electronically just 15 years ago are already becoming difficult to access. The Domesday Project, a multimedia archive of British life in 1986 designed as a digital counterpart to the original Domesday Book compiled by monks in 1086, was stored on laser discs.
The equipment needed to view the images on these discs is already very rare, yet the Domesday book, written on paper, is still accessible more than 1,000 years after it was produced.
Still accessible after 1000 years Read More »
From Ask Yahoo!:
According to the CIA World Factbook, as of July, 2005, there were approximately 6,446,131,400 people on the planet, and the death rate was approximately 8.78 deaths per 1,000 people a year. According to our nifty desktop calculator, that works out to roughly 56,597,034 people leaving us every year. That’s about a 155,000 a day. …
The legal information resource ItsMyLife.com offers some interesting mortality statistics for the United States. Of the 2,400,000-plus Americans who die each year, over 45,000 are killed in transport accidents. The number of homicides, poisonings, and drunk driving fatalities are roughly the same, at around 17,000 each. Perhaps more surprisingly, a stunning 178,000 Americans die from medical or hospital error every year. …
The United Nations also offers a 2005 World Health Report. One of its key findings: this year almost 11 million children under the age of five will die from a preventable disease.
How many people die each year in the world? Read More »
From Giampaolo Garzarelli’s Open Source Software and the Economics of Organization:
Deborah Savage, in an innovative piece, proposes the following economic definition of a profession: a ‘profession is a network of strategic alliances across ownership boundaries among practitioners who share a core competence’ [Savage, D. A. (1994) “The Professions in theory and history: the case of pharmacy”, Business and Economic History 23 (2): 129-60.] …
In sum, the general organizational implications of Savage’s theory of professions are considerable. The most germane implications for our purposes seem to be the following.
- The theory allows to narrowly define the area of operation of a profession because of its emphasis on core competencies – for example, pharmaceuticals, software, semiconductors, etc. – around which other capabilities and routines evolve and revolve.
- It allows to distinguish professions from other forms of organization, such as firms, because integration of ownership is not a condicio sine qua non.
- Professionals are autonomous and authoritative in their fields for their competencies allow them, on the one hand, ‘to solve routine problems easily and non-routine problems routinely’ (Savage 1994: 140) and, on the other, enable them to evaluate, and only be challenged by, other professionals. More concretely, they are independent yet interact in a coordinated and fertile fashion.
- Professions are decentralized networks in that there’s not a central authority in command. The ‘organization’ of a profession is guaranteed by the exchange of knowledge that reduces uncertainty and stimulates trust amongst members. Professions are thus self-organizing.
- Relatedly, there’s the role played by reputation as a signalling of quality, viz., reputation is a positive externality. Thus, professions can be interpreted as self-regulating organizations …
In a seminal article published in 1965, ‘An economic theory of clubs’, Buchanan described and formalized the institutional properties of a new category of good (or product) lying between the public and private polar extremes, conventionally called shared good. The good is usually enjoyed only by members participating in a voluntary association – i.e., a club – whose membership may be regulated by some dues. The theory of clubs, in a nutshell, studies the different institutional arrangements governing the supply and demand of the shared good. [Buchanan, J. M. (1965) “An economic theory of clubs”, Economica, N.S., 32 (125): 1-14.] …
Professions and clubs Read More »
From InfoWorld:
In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard’s Software Design and Usability, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) alumnus Austin Henderson says that “one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin.” There was always space for unofficial data, which traveled with the official data, and everybody knew about the relationship between the two.
The innovation of the margin Read More »
This was written 15 January 2002, & the Hungry Buddha is gone now, but this is still an interesting description.
Just got back from lunch at the Hungry Buddha. Man, that was good. It’s a small place on Washington Street in downtown St. Louis. There are signs all along the walls: “Buddha would bus his own table”. “Buddha would tip”. “Overfilling your bowl is bad karma”. A stereo played a mix of tunes, everything from Smashing Pumpkins to other stuff — and at a reasonable volume that made conversation easy.
The food was really great. Basically, you grab a bowl and go through a vegetable buffet — probably the best vegetable buffet I’ve ever seen, with peppers, sprouts, carrots, celery, shitake mushrooms (!), and more! — filling your bowl, then go to the counter and answer a few questions:
“Rice, noodles, or broth?”
“One bowl or all you can eat?”
“Tofu?”
“Water, tea, or soda?”
“What kind of sauce?”
They take your bowl into the kitchen and cook it up to your specifications. 10 minutes later, a hot, steaming bowl of yummy goodness is delivered to your table. Cost? $6.50 for a bowl, or $7.50 for all you can eat.
I got the Sichuan sauce with rice & tofu the first time, and then I went back for Black Bean Garlic sauce with rice & tofu. Both were excellent. However, next time I go, I think I’ll just get one bowl — I ate both, but I think I accumulated some gluttony points with the hereafter.
If you’re downtown and feeling hungry, check out the Hungry Buddha — you won’t be disappointed!
The late great Hungry Buddha Read More »
From The Sun:
SHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll — and uncovered a giant green WILLY.
Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” at a seaside fair.
And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them.
Hulk, Willie, or Peter? Read More »
From Yahoo! News (March 2004):
Andy Rooney certainly knows how to stir the passion in his viewers. The ’60 Minutes’ curmudgeon said Sunday he got 30,000 pieces of mail and e-mail in response to his Feb. 22 commentary, in which he called ‘The Passion of the Christ’ filmmaker Mel Gibson a ‘wacko.’
It’s the biggest viewer response ever to a segment on the CBS newsmagazine, which has been on the air since 1968, a spokesman said. …
He read some of the mail on the air, including one letter that called him an ‘asinine, bottom-dwelling, numb-skulled, low-life, slimy, sickening, gutless, spineless, ignorant, pot-licking, cowardly pathetic little weasel.’
Now that is one good insult Read More »
From Yahoo! News (March 2004):
Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office
Best entertainment news headline ever Read More »
From BBC News:
A man lay dead in his flat for 15 months before his body was found.
Recording an open verdict into the death of Derek Perkins, 63, coroner Dr Nigel Chapman said he had never known a body to be undiscovered for so long.
The exact date of Mr Perkins’ death is unknown, but a newspaper found near his body was dated 31 December, 2002. …
In a written statement, Nottingham City Council said they had tried to make contact during the past six months by letter, phone and visits.
It said faster rent arrears procedures should help the council investigate problems sooner.
From The Invisible Library:
The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library’s catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.
A library of imaginary books Read More »
From John Baez:
The Voynich manuscript is by far the most mysterious of all texts. It is seven by ten inches in size, and about 200 pages long. It is made of soft, light-brown vellum. It is written in a flowing cursive script in alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania seems to have gone insane trying to figure it out. Though the manuscript was found in Italy, statistical analyses show the text is completely different in character from any European language.
The mystery of the Voynich mss Read More »
From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A convicted murderer being held in Atlanta is refusing to sign a waiver the district attorney says it needs to release the remains of an 8-year-old East Texas boy.
Without the waiver, the family of Chad Choice cannot hold a funeral, although the boy was killed more than a decade ago.
Patrick Horn’s attorney has made repeated efforts over the past month to get the man now serving a life federal prison sentence in Georgia for unrelated crimes to sign the waiver.
But those efforts have been ignored …
Chad was shot in 1991, and buried in a shallow grave behind a house where Horn’s family lived. Horn then tormented the Choice family for years, sending ransom notes and placing Chad’s skull on the doorstep of the Choices’ home on the fourth anniversary of the boy’s disappearance.
The boy’s fate wasn’t revealed until 1996 while Horn was in Smith County Jail serving time for other crimes.
The waiver is necessary because the body parts were found five years after the boy’s death, and those remains were crucial evidence used to convict Horn.
A horrid legal conundrum Read More »
From Ohio.com:
It was 11:15 p.m. on a warm June night in 1950, and the area of Times Square was buzzing with people leaving the theaters.
Suddenly, in the midst of traffic appeared an odd-looking man, about 30 years old. He wore mutton-chop whiskers and quaint clothing that had gone out of style decades before.
The man gawked at his surroundings, and then tried to dash away from the cars. He was struck by a cab and killed.
Police found on the dead man antique currency, business cards in the name of Rudolph Fentz, and a letter addressed to Fentz postmarked in 1876.
Assuming the man was Fentz, police sought the next of kin. But Fentz wasn’t listed in the telephone directory, and no one at the address on the business card and letter knew him.
Capt. Hubert V. Rihm eventually turned up a 1939 phone book listing a Rudolph Fentz Jr. When Rihm located the junior’s widow, she told him her father-in-law had vanished in 1876 after going out for a smoke.
That knowledge in hand, Rihm dug into old police files and found the missing-person report from 1876. The address given was the same as that on the dead man’s business cards.
More proof of time travel? Read More »
From Making Light:
The funny thing is, I’ve seen time travellers in NYC. Or at any rate I’ve seen people I thought were time travellers, and one case where I was sure.
This happened one day back in the 1980s. I was riding the subway home from work, and this kid got on at 34th or 42nd. He was at most twelve but I think younger, and slightly built at that. What caught my eye first was that he was wearing a jacket with a waistline seam–not a full-blown norfolk jacket, less obtrusive than that, but in that class. Which was odd; it had been over half a century since boys’ and men’s jackets stopped having waistline seams.
I started noticing more things about him. His pants ended just below his knees. That was unobtrusive too; his pants were dark, and so were his long woolen socks. If you weren’t really looking, the combination would register as black trousers, and you wouldn’t think anything of it. He had a flat woolen cap, and a sweater on under the jacket, and his shoes were what you’d expect with the rest of the outfit. Think newsboy, turn of the century or a little later, and you’ve got it.
But what struck me as genuinely odd was that he wasn’t wearing his clothes like a costume. Those were just his clothes, and they weren’t new, either. I honestly believe that if he’d gotten onto the same subway in the same clothing but had felt like he was dressed up for a masquerade, half the car would have noticed him right away.
Time travelers on the NYC subway Read More »
From ABC News:
For the past seven years Terrifica has been patrolling New York’s party and bar scene, looking out for women who have had a little too much to drink and are in danger of being taken advantage of by men. She says she has saved several women from both themselves and predators who would prey upon their weaknesses — both from alcohol and a misguided notion that they have to go out drinking to find a companion.
“I protect the single girl living in the big city,” says Terrifica, sporting blond Brunhild wig with a golden mask and a matching Valkyrie bra. “I do this because women are weak. They are easily manipulated, and they need to be protected from themselves and most certainly from men and their ill intentions toward them.” …
“To feel like you have to go to a bar, to put yourself out there, feeling like you have worth only when you’re married, engaged, or have a boyfriend, that’s weakness,” Terrifica says. “People are happiest when they’re alone and living their solitary lives.” …
“I really only have my utility belt. I’m not superstrong. I’m from this Earth,” she says. “I know I have to be very cautious. But the difference is I’m sober. And drunk people who are hostile are still drunk people. I have a degree of control, and my mission and purpose can usually get me out of dangerous situations.”
However, Terrifica does carry pepper spray in her utility belt, which also includes a cell phone, lipstick, a camera to take pictures of alleged male predators, a logging book, Terrifica fortune cards and — last but not least — Smarties candies. …
“Bartenders tend to be men, and they tend to be attracted to me,” she says. “Most men are. That’s part of my power.” …
Terrifica has also become somewhat of a nemesis to one alleged Casanova in particular: A man who likes to dress in velvet and prefers to be called “Fantastico.” He says that over the years, Terrifica has thwarted his attempts on numerous occasions to get to know women a little better. …
But while Terrifica has never addressed Fantastico directly, her alter-ego Sarah has. Sarah says she was seduced by Fantastico years ago.
Terrifica, a superhero for our times Read More »
From CNN:
Customs officials opened his suitcase and a bird of paradise flew out but that was nothing compared to what they found in his pants — a pair of pygmy monkeys.
Californian Robert Cusack has been sentenced to 57 days in jail for trying to smuggle the monkeys, a total of four exotic birds and 50 rare orchids into Los Angeles Airport after a trip to Thailand, officials said on Thursday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Johns said Cusack had been undergoing a routine inspection when he arrived last June until an official opened his suitcase.
“It became non-routine when they opened his luggage and a bird of paradise took off flying in the terminal,” Johns said.
Johns said the agents found three more birds in his bag, tucked into nylon stockings, along with 50 orchids of a threatened species.
Asked by agents if he had anything else to tell them, Cusack responded: “Yes, I’ve got monkeys in my pants.”
Greatest last line ever Read More »
From The New York Times:
Perhaps it was the bottle of 1947 Château Pétrus for £12,300 ($17,500). Or maybe it was the 1945 vintage from the same vineyard for £11,600 ($16,500). During dinner at a fashionable restaurant here, six investment bankers lapped up £44,000 ($62,700) in fine wines, and now they are suffering from a huge hangover.
Their employer, Barclays Capital, has fired all but one of the bankers since the dinner last July at Pétrus, a restaurant in London … when some of the bankers secretly tried to pass off their part of the bill as client expenses, Barclays began firing them one by one.
Gourmets willing to spend £50 for three courses can tuck into the cooking of Marcus Wareing, including sautéed medallion of stuffed confit pig trotter or roast breast of Anjou pigeon on a parsnip galette.
But the food was very much a sideshow to this particular dinner, which also included a third Château Pétrus, this one a 1946 vintage for £9,400. Then there was a 1984 Montrachet for £1,400, two bottles of Kronenbourg beer at £3.50 each, six glasses of Champagne for £9.50 each, one juice at £3, 10 bottles of water totaling £35, a pack of cigarettes for £5 and, to wash it all down, a bottle of 100-year-old Château d’Yquem dessert wine for £9,200.
Nothing fails like excess Read More »
From The Washington Post:
Akiko Abe has barely seen her 25-year-old son in six years, yet they live in the same small house. He leaves his room only when he’s sure his parents are out or asleep, she said. She can tell when he has used the kitchen, and she knows he goes to the living room to watch television and use the computer at night.
As many as a million Japanese — most of them young men — are considered shut-ins, either literally cloistered in their rooms or refusing to work and avoiding all social contact for periods ranging from six months to more than 10 years. Forty-one percent live reclusively for one to five years, according to a government survey.