A week or two ago, I had a conversation with a couple of coworkers about the use of blogs/social media to gather information about subjects (and hence justify why I spend so many hours on Google Reader). They were fairly skeptical of the ability of blogs to do the same job that the New York [...]
After a week of anticipation, I finally got to watch the new Star Trek movie on Friday in IMAX. I was a little bummed that I had arrived at the theater late (my girlfriend’s classmate foolishly chose not to take the cab with us and got lost trying to find the theater), forcing us to [...]
A picture is (almost) worth $1.9 trillion. Why so big? I trace it to three things: No politician ever wants to raise taxes. When’s the last time voters wanted to pay more in taxes? This is the most basic pitfall of liberal politics and politicians who have to find ways to defend or structure their [...]
I was reading a column by Pauline Chen on the New York Times about resident work-hour reform, and I have to say that I’m very stunned and somewhat outraged at a doctor’s claim that resident work-hour reform is a bad idea: I spoke with Dr. Thomas J. Nasca, the chief executive of the Accreditation Council for [...]
From the Telegraph (HT: Serena): The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US Treasury bonds if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation. Two Chinese officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent [...]
I’m not married to tradition. I usually don’t believe, in what some may even describe as “cold-heartedly”, in the sacredness of many institutions and customs. For instance, I don’t see higher divorce rates today, the desire of homosexuals to marry, the decline of opera/ballet, or the decline of the US as a manufacturing/farming superpower to [...]
A lot of the debate around the proposed bailout of Detroit auto manufacturers has centered around what caused GM, Ford, and Chrysler to do so poorly (random fact of the day: the market capitalization of GM is now less than 30% of that of Bed, Bath, and Beyond). More specifically, these debates have centered around [...]
I recently made a post on Bench Press about the potential for distributed computing (projects like Folding@Home and SETI@Home which combine the computing power from volunteers over the internet to do supercomputer style calculations) to help any initiative needing extra number-crunching power, as well as steps that the scientific and distributed computing communities can take [...]
A friend of mine (Lisa X) shared this article from the New York Times on Larry Summers’s appointment to Obama’s economic team. I was originally going to just leave a comment on my Google shared list , but my list of comments got so long I felt I needed to actually make a blog post on [...]
Every good story needs a good villain. After all, some of fiction’s greatest characters are compelling — or just plain awesome — bad guys (disclosure: I may be a little biased considering how two of the 10 people I’d love to meet most are Dr. Doom and Lex Luthor). But, while you can be fairly [...]