Posts from: October 2009

24 Oct 2009

First Flourine Bomb Victim

Kansas resident Mike Nolan was the victim of a vicious bombing according to news agency “Fox4kc”. We’re still awaiting word from DHS about troop deployment to Overland Park.

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22 Oct 2009

ToDo: War on Terror Accounting

With all the talk of whether or not to increase troops in Afghanistan, and the ethics of killing from your armchair, I think a group needs to sit down and study the full costs and benefits of these wars. As provoking as tragedies like 9/11 are, if we assign value to “innocent” human lives equally

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22 Oct 2009

Call it “SecondOpinion”

The creators of StackOverflow should team up with the Dept. of Health & Human Services and launch a medical Q&A site based on the SO model. StackOverflow was designed by a few programmers to scratch an itch within the community, and the model they came up with made it the most effective question/answer site I’ve

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22 Oct 2009

Top 5 Random Depressing Problems in Criminal Justice

(Written in August) Forensic science is already shaky and, if DNA can be fabricated, it’s about to get even shakier. The public defender system is poorly funded and in shambles. Poor, mentally ill youths generally end up dumped in jail Florida sends a lot of teens to prison for life Our prisons are no longer

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22 Oct 2009

Reasonable People May Not Show

(Obviously started in August) In the age of Glenn Beck, the town hall meeting paradigm is just the anonymous web forum with no moderator. The people interested in genuine discussion won’t go near it, and “socialist!” is the new “yr gay”. To this extent the tea party folks have certainly been successful at churning out

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22 Oct 2009

We need a distributed social networking protocol…Could Opera Unite be a key?

(Written July 2007) The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or

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22 Oct 2009

Smallest valid HTML documents

HTML4 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”> <title></title> <p> HTML5 <!DOCTYPE html> Smallest “useful” HTML5 document <!DOCTYPE html> <link rel=stylesheet href=site.css> <script src=site.js></script> <title>Page Title</title> <h1>Heading</h1> <p>Content… Check em if you want. To avoid problems in IE you might want an opening body tag, but you don’t need a closing one!

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22 Oct 2009

Thoughts on The Wire Season One

(From January 7) Over the break Kathleen and I watched a bunch of movies, but season 1 of The Wire delivered beyond the hype it got from friends. It gives a crash course on the frustration and futility of local cops fighting drug gangs on the street level in West Baltimore. The police jump through

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In
22 Oct 2009

Questions for Economists

(First of the series “Getting rid of all these draft posts”) Should we really go back to the Gold Standard? I gather only Austrian school (Mises, Hayek, et al.) economists really think a return to “sound” money would be possible or beneficial to the economy, and most prominent economists think it would be disastrous. Has

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17 Oct 2009

Skateboarding and the (Fake) Broken Windows Theory

Nike’s latest glossy skate video “Debacle” is stitched around several highly-realistic, faked acts of vandalism and assault, but none shocking if you’ve watched a lot of skate videos; I just assumed they were real until the disclaimer appeared at the end. I’ve seen pros show off how they cut chains to break into schools; accidentally

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In
1 Oct 2009

Kleiman on Crime and Punishment

Remind your fiscally conservative politician that all these have severe public costs: Crime Prison cells Disease spread in overcrowded prisons Reduced number of working citizens Broken families and lack of role models Public fear of victimization Evidence shows we can have a criminal justice system that actually convinces most criminals to give up crime while

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