Weekend Reading

Data shows that Venezuela benefited greatly under Hugo Chavez. How does such a significant positive change of this magnitude get completely buried by the US media's dislike for a person?

How they made and moved the SR-71 Blackbird. Lots of pictures.

Wikipedia article on the General American accent.

More money, certis paribus, makes you happier. The evidence for this has been accumulating for the last five to ten years.

GMO opponents are the climate skeptics of the left.

The first images of individual atoms forming molecules has been produced, and they look just like the chemistry text book said they would.

Backlog of Readings

Stuff White People Like - #34 - Architecture.

The secret world of Trader Joe's.

Short mockumentary on plastic bag migration.

Letter grades for vehicle efficiency.

HP hold The Navy hostage to the tune of 3.3 billion (3,300 millions).

Apparently Microsoft thinks it's a good idea to let people pirate their stuff because, you know, it increases your market share. In fact, they didn't let people pirate Vista and it hurt Microsoft somewhat badly, or perhaps no one wanted to steal such a terribly designed OS.

The Chinese envision a double decker bus with cars passing underneath.

Young, single, childless women earn more than men their same age. So further proof that the vast majority of the wage discrepancy is due to the fact that womens' priorities shift after having a child.

Scientists have built a computer program that suggests potential research hypothesis after doing a complete reading of the relevant literature. Pretty awesome.

Mayor Daley will not seek reelection.

Short - it's actually quite hard to tell if someone is drunk.

Sustainable building at 301Monroe.com.

Monday Reading

China becomes the worlds second largest economy (as measured by country) passing Japan. China's economy is still 1/3 the size of the US's.

Wind power manufacturing in the US is growing... fast. The cost of transporting the large components too far means that domestic manufacturing is here to stay and grow.

Portable lightweight housing that can be erected in a day with nothing but a screw driver. Here's a somewhat more established non-profit manufacturer, World Shelters, of a similar product that has humanitarian and individual sales in mind.

Roosevelt Island near New York has an island wide trash sucking system... no more garbage cans. Photos.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is slashing the Pentagon's budget which has increased unabated since late 2001 - in fact in nominal terms it has doubled in the last decade. This isn't small stuff. He's talking about almost trillion dollars over 9 years. Lots of this has already happened.

^ Speaking of a trillion only 21% of Americans knew how much a trillion dollars was relative to a million. It's a million millions. There are 1000 millions in a billion and 1000 billions in a trillion.

Greenspan calls for an end to the Bush tax cuts! But for all the wrong reasons... he thinks the deficit is too big and the (to use Krugman's coinage) the invisible bond vigilantes could strike at any time. Yet somehow bond rates hit a record low yesterday.

Best story ever? Wikileaks, after having embarrassed the military by releasing some 77,000 classified transcripts from Afghanistan, says it wants to release another 17,000. The military is coyly threatening them, so what did wikileaks do? It distributed an encrypted torrent through Piratebay.org that has a large file size. They say the classified information in the torrent is much more damaging that what is already out there. So... if the government does anything, they tweet the encrypted torrent passwords and tens of thousands of people around the world unlock their classified torrent. Brilliant.

NYT story on purple martins - the bird that eats a ton of insects and relies on humans for its housing. We had one in my backyard when I was growing up that still exists.

All sorts of old people are missing in Japan, or rather lots of them have died and their children hide their death in order to collect their pensions.

Ecosystem engineering - I'm curious to see the results of this test. If it's at all promising it could mean huge gains for the natural world.

One of the most famous daguerreotype series recently went under restoration efforts which found that they have a degree of detail that is - utterly shocking. Basically at 30x magnification the plates don't lose detail. That means the series of 8 - 6.5"x8.5" plates could be blown up to 170' by 20' without losing any detail. The irony is that photography in its early stages often produced images that are in many ways more detailed, fine, and artistic than modern cameras are capable of producing. How powerful would your digital camera need to be? Oh, 140,000 megapixels.

Links

This robo-mule is yet another cool invention by DARPA. I wonder how much this costs? Watch the video.

I read probably three new solar/wind/wave energy system updates every day. This new vortex powered machine is one of the coolest in a while.

Kind of cool calorie measuring/pedometer device. Probably a bad idea for anorexic and workout crazy people.

Articles

This first one is a but long, but it's a great look into open-source hardware. I had no idea such a thing existed. It seems that any product or forum that utilizes user generated content comes up with incredibly original ideas at a break neck pace.

For those of you who have been living under a rock this is Blackwater. I was unaware that there was as much controversy about them. There are all sorts of links on that video's page that are worth watching. I started researching them a bit after I had a privatization debate with a friend. Although I tend to lean towards the side of privatization on many issues the military is certainly not one of them. Here's how much Bush knows about them. Scary...

Cops are racist... who knew?

Take it Thoreau. I read the other day that while living at Walden pond, which was near town and his family home, he would often go home on weekends to raid the cookie jar. So much for seclusion.