Every address on the Internet has an associated IP address, a series of four numbers connected by three periods. For example, Google owns the range of IPs from 74.125.0.0 to 74.125.255.255. Typing the IP address into your user bar works – try it by typing 74.125.1.1 into your address bar, and the Google homepage comes [...]
Posts from ‘June, 2009’
Six budget proposals for the California government
The California government faces a $24 billion dollar shortfall. Here are some sensible proposals for helping cut the budget deficit, that will never happen. #1. Charge market prices for utilities like water and electricity. Every other year, the State goes through a water shortage, or blackouts, because the state keeps the price of electricity and [...]
Cognitive error alert
Do a google search for “$10 billion.” The results also match with “$10 million,” which is a smaller number by a factor of 1,000. Helping people conflate the two is not good for the public.
Here – you throw this away
Many students promote their events by handing out colorful flyers outside student dining halls. Most students will do anything to avoid taking one; successful defenses include mumbling, faking a cellphone conversation, or staring at the ground, essentially the same tactics people use when the homeless ask for money. While I don’t often give money to [...]
Failures of media outlets, part I
Today’s failure of the mainstream media is inserting “balance” into a story where there is none. The media often gives groups the appearance of legitimacy by acting as if some issue is open for debate, when in fact the issue clearly favors one side or the other. As George Orwell often wrote, language is extremely [...]
Should professional sports players be subject to labor restrictions and draft regulations?
Tommy Craggs of Deadspin has an excellent new post up on why Scott Boras, the most hated agent in sports, is not actually that evil. Currently, teams take turns selecting players they like, which means that the player can only sign with that team, has to live where the team tells him, can get traded [...]
Paragraph of the day
Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster [...]
We won't solve global warming through voluntary effort
People who say they care about the environment believe that we could end global warming if only every person, corporation, and government, cared about the environment as much as they do. Certainly they believe that by purchasing carbon offsets, voting for high speed rail and expensive public transit, shopping at Whole Foods/purchasing locally, buying Priuses/Vespas/used [...]
The Oakland A's Lost Advantage
Michael Lewis stated recently in an interview with MSNBC: The [Oakland] A’s have no intellectual advantage, as evidenced by their performance. Oakland is certainly not helping their cause with incompetent managing. After Oakland’s Orlando Cabrera hit a leadoff double in the first inning of tonight’s game against the White Sox, the team was in an [...]
