Random Thoughts

OK, I'm just going to say it.  Where was law enforcement? We have a registered sex offender, we have a neighbor reporting children on the property in November 2006, we have a parole violation in…

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten…

Data on the distribution of wealth is apparently hard to come by directly, but inheritance tax data from the UK for some years is available.  This data, it turns out, can be well-fit by an…

"It is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes"(From a sentence attributed to Josef Stalin) With a thought to Middle Eastern elections...

In 2007, advertisements talking about how much money you could make sitting on your butt if you would just BUY THEIR SECRET were at least interesting.     We got tales of people making…

Before blogs, writers could delusionally imagine great things about who was reading them: If you look at the traffic statistics for any newsish website you’ll see that people are reading when they’re…

While searching Scientific Blogging to make sure no one had written anything on a topic I'm about to undertake, I saw the following headline under the Science Codex bar on the bottom right of the…

The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from…

In watching an interview the other day with Craig T. Nelson, I couldn't help but be struck by how dramatically the role of government is both taken for granted, and ignored.  It is precisely…

Back from vacations, I found the usual pile of errands, tons of unattended emails, papers to review to take care of at work. I got home pretty tired tonight, and I was more than else looking for some…