Monday, November 19, 2007

Dogs have Owners, Cats have Staff


Dr. Zaius has a great post about the joy of cats that strangely has nothing to do with chasing them.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Buyers Remorse


This month has brought two of my coworkers little bundles of sleep deprivation and anxiety - all costs of having a new born. It amazing how much new parents complain about their choice now, but within a year have absolutely no memory of what you're talking about.

On a related note Amelia Tyagi has a provocative book called the The Two-income Trap where she argues that changes in society have created a situation where having a child has become the greatest indicator of who will file bankruptcy. MJ has an interview with Amelia Tyagi discussing the finding in her book.

Definition leCondel

Hebrew slang created by Israeli government officials. Derived from the name of the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meaning to come and go to meetings that produce few results.

More Colorado Insanity

Colorado, like California, ranges politically from the lunatic authoritarian Christan ring-wing nuts of Colorado Springs to the whacked out self-absorbed people's republic of Boulder. Usually both groups are kept contained within in their respective reservations, but recently the christofascists emerged from their caves to annoy the rest of us.

The Colorado Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for an anti-abortion group to collect signatures for a ballot measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person.


While I see where they are going with this, their lack of understanding basic human biology means that the law would define nearly every sexually active woman as committing murder when one of her fertilized eggs doesn't implant. So even if it passes, it will clog the courts and waste everyone's time getting it overturned. When the left uses the law to harass business the right has a fit, but when they do the same thing, they turn a blind eye.

Thanks to Brilliant at Breakfast for pointing this out.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Ask500People Poles

Ask 500 People is an online community Poling site. By adding their script to your site, anyone who visits your site can vote on the question of the day. One hundred of the votes are taken at random to be used for the survey. The attempt here is to create a meaningful survey by using random selection. Unfortunately since the online community isn't itself random, there is a built in bias. Still the results can be interesting. The potential survey questions are submitted by the community and ranked. If enough people vote for a question, it becomes part of the pole.


First Snow

Well technically at least. Woke up to a thin frosting of the white stuff in our back yard. It only took a couple hours of day light to make it go away, so it didn't disturb Kelly one bit.