The Beginning Starts Soon…and the End for Some

Well, back to politics and stuff for a bit. This coming week is the Iowa caucuses to be followed five days later by the New Hampshire primaries. No one really knows who is going to win in either party at this point. Polls show different things at different times though the only major differences seem [...]

The Coolest Stuff Is Just Down the Road

Yesterday I was helping someone shop for a laptop and researching two different models. One of them was the Dell XPS M1330. It had two technologies that made for a lighter laptop with excellent performance. One was available at only a moderate price premium and the other really kicked up the price. The first of [...]

Good Software from CPUID

I found references recently to an extremely useful little tool called CPU-Z from CPUID. It’s small, fast, extremely useful and you don’t even have to install the program. Just tell it to run and it will tell you about your motherboard, memory, cpu and BIOS. The utility itself is free. There’s even an SDK for [...]

Broadening Things Back Out

In case you hadn’t noticed the last couple of posts weren’t about politics or economics. I thought it wasn’t just time to go back to posting on a much more regular basis but to also broaden the subjects in the way I’d originally envisioned. So while I’ll post about interesting things in politics, economics and [...]

Good Neighbors, Galactically Speaking That Is

This is enough to make you really appreciate good quiet neighbors. Galactic neighbors, that is. Imagine something as energetic as a jet of radiation being shot out from a supermassive black hole, one of those huge monsters with the mass of as much as millions of stars. The energy involved must be enormous and even [...]

Wishing Bad Luck on Your Neighbor

OK. I admit it. I really hope that our neighbor has a bit of bad luck. Of course I’m not alone. There are some planetary scientists and astronomers who agree with me. Of course the neighbor is millions of miles away, our planetary neighbor Mars. If you haven’t heard about this one, Mars has a [...]

Merry Christmas

It’s Christmas morning. Family arrived last night. Toddlers and children wander around, waiting for Grandma to finish preparation for the Christmas dinner ham and slip it into the oven and for their aunt, uncle and cousins that live in town to get over here so presents can be open. I did cleanup work for her [...]

Yes, They Think We’re Stupid

MSNBC reports on the last Republican candidate debate before Iowa’s caucuses. It is noted that they all basically agreed on at least one big lie.
Republican presidential rivals called for deep cuts in federal spending Wednesday in a debate remarkably free of acrimony and agreed the reductions they seek need not require painful sacrifice by millions [...]

The Curveball of Economics

Brad DeLong points out a couple of articles that speak of the reality of tax cuts and that the Republican claims that they always produce more revenue, currently being pushed extra hard by Rudy Giuliani, just aren’t true. None of what they say is really hard to understand and it makes a lot of sense. [...]

Who Should Get the Dishonorable Discharge?

The Washington Post tells us about a truly tragic situation where a soldier in Iraq broke down, threatened fellow soldiers and then attempted suicide. The professional consensus is that she was truly insane at the time of the incident and should receive the treatment she needs. The Army’s response? Court-martial her. Threaten her. Bully her. This [...]