Two tidbits for those that love the funny pages:
Martijn Reemst has now added a search function to his comprehensive Calvin and Hobbes directory, allowing the visitor to recall the best of Spaceman Spiff.

Worth100.com has entered round 5 of the Far Side Photoshop Contest, where participants flex their image manipulation muscles remaking classic Larson creations as real-life, full color, multi-dimentional representations of the original pen and ink creations.

I'm not at all sure that if I didn't see my daughter from ten days after her birth until six years later, I would recognize her.

But this mother did, and she was calm enough to create a ruse by which she could obtain hair-samples from the child for DNA testing purposes, thus exposing a pretty brazen kidnapping/faked death. Wow.

Yet another author whose works I keep meaning to read has died: historian Daniel Boorstin.

Did Dean give the Dems back their party?

Whether or not you supported him, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

I'm inclined to think he was helpful in that regard.

Jon Cusack is cool.

(No, not that Jon Cusack -- this is some other Jon Cusack. But this is still hilarious.)

Kevin Drum on the economy:

The sign of of a healthy economy is not so much that living standards are high for the middle class, but that they are getting higher — that people believe their children will be better off than they are. But as income inequality increases and income mobility decreases that's increasingly not the case, and the question at hand is whether we ever plan on doing anything about it. How long does the middle class have to stagnate in the midst of ever more stratospheric wealth for the rich before even conservatives finally admit that we have a problem?

It's a long post, but a good one, with quite a bit of information, such as this depressing nugget: Every state in the United States, except Nebraska and Nevada, has seen an overall shift of jobs from high-paying industries to lower-paying industries over the last three years.

I've mentioned before that I like WIRED because it's really optimistic, a lot of the time, and sometimes I just plain need a good, stiff shot of such optimism. But their unbridled "happy view", in which just about anything that happens in the tech industry is A-OK, sometimes gets cloying -- such as their current issue, which seems to argue in this article that outsourcing is just ducky. A representative exchange, in which the author interviews someone who wants to make outsourcing more difficult:

"But isn't part of this country's vitality its ability to make these kinds of changes?" I counter. "We've done it before - going from farm to factory, from factory to knowledge work, and from knowledge work to whatever's next."

She looks at me. Then she says, "I'd like to know where you go from knowledge."

Anyone else enjoy brain teasers and IQ-type tests? Here are a few from the International High IQ Society. I've taken several of these types of tests online, but never an "actual" IQ test administered and scored by a human. Have any of you been given an IQ test? If so, how do your scores compare with any you have taken online?

BTW, I was a member of International High IQ Society when it was free. They had some great puzzles and an interesting newsletter, but I just can't bring myself to pay for membership without thinking about Peggy Hill and the "150 Smartest People in Texas."

I know that my sense of humor tends toward the demented, but this picture really made me laugh. (But then, I just can't get enough of this whole Howard Dean thing.)

(Link edited)

OK, who's planning to see this?



I want to, although I'll probably wait for the DVD.

Reactions to the Moon-Mars thing, nicely collected in one place.

(via Paul Riddell, my source for pithy science commentary)

Rolling Stone has a story about Justin Frankel, the inventor of Winamp and Gnutella (via kottke). I didn't know he wrote both of those. My thoughts:

- this guy's value on 'what he wants to do' is too high.
- AOL does stink.
- like Jaq has said, you can't be naive enough to think that, by empowering people you're not gouging the recording industry. Surely most of Gnutella's traffic is illeagal.
- there should be ways to listen before buying. But music that you keep listening to should be paid for.
- however, the current industry is messed up and charges too much.
- some of his motivations sound noble, down to 'taking the wind out of Napster's sails', but, again, it's naive to think there won't be abuse and to take no responsibility for the abuse, isn't it? What would the analogs with guns or cars be (oh, wait. Those industries shirk responsibility, too.)
- more naivete: AOL pays you 100 million dollars, they own you What'd you think? If you don't want them to own you, give some of the money back or negotiate a buy out or something.
- re: Frankel's question at the end, for my part, I think people tend to do what they want, even if it hurts others. We need structures in place to discourage some of those hurts, to keep all of us reined in a little. The tragedy of the commons seems obvious to me.

I've got a post on Metallica, too, that I'm going to put up on interact.

We now have an RSS feed for Collaboratory. Blogger added the feature this morning. I'm hoping it'll start showing up on BlogRolling as recently updated, but it has other advantages as well, like RSS readers. Any of y'all use those?

Did we get our first comment spam?

Futility has nagged at Caroline for a long time. Four years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, she sat at her kitchen table in Claremont, N.H., and added up her life. It was the height of the economic boom. The nation wallowed in luxury, burst with microchips, consumed with abandon, swaggered globally. Everything grew larger: homes, vehicles, stock portfolios, life expectancy. Never before in the sweep of human history had so many people been so utterly comfortable.

Caroline was not one of them.

Crooked Timber's Harry Farrell has some pointed commentary regarding comments made on other weblogs regarding the New York Times article, "A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class", a vignette about one member of the working poor.

"You want to convince me of something, give me numbers." - young Jed Bartlet in the episode "Two Cathedrals" from The West Wing.

Filched from MeFi, here are some numbers on the Bush Administration.

Keep up the good work Start up the good work anytime now, Mr. President.

Collaboratory demographic survey time:

How many of you have taken the Best Places quiz before? I took it several years ago, but then again this morning.

What do you all consider the most important aspects of places to live, according to the categories they use? If you got to pick exactly where you lived, where would it be?

WE'RE GOING BACK TO THE MOON!!!!

(butwe'regonnacanceleverythingnotrelatedtothemoonormarsincludingkeepingHubbleworkinguntilareplacementisready! Shhhhhhdon'ttellanyonehaveaniceday)

Via Bookslut:

1. Someone named Caitlin Flanagan somewhat-favorably reviews Dr. Laura's new book.

2. Someone named Maud Newton isn't impressed.

3. I'm not sure why I'm posting this, but it struck me as interesting. I find Dr. Laura to be one of the most nauseating people in American life, and pretty much purely on that basis I tend to desperately want to ignore everything she does, which is pretty much what I do. Oh well.