I don’t really think this is why people pirate DVDs, but this is still a great graphic illustrating one way that the movie studios punish their paying customers. So true.

(I think people generally pirate movies because they want them for free rather than paying for them. I think people rip movies they legitimately own for a lot of reasons, this being one of them.)

Sorry to be a downer, but I hate to be depressed all by myself: An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification.

Terry Pratchett is hoping he can die on his own terms:

And so I have vowed that rather than let Alzheimer’s take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the Brompton Cocktail some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.

I hope for his sake that he can. Everybody should be allowed to opt out early, stigma-free, legal-entanglement-free.

Here’s a great Slowpoke strip from 2006 that is painfully relevant today.

Genius, 12-section comic, Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable, with each of the 12 sections being both hysterical and the gospel truth.

Fantastic post on terrorism, which opens with a band-beating metaphor:

I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

So, so good. Read now.

This one might be the graphic of the year for me. National Geographic has a brilliant visualization of healthcare spending, life expectancy, and doctor visits per country. Here’s a taste, but you gotta click through to the full version to find the US on there (the red line below should give you some idea):

Sigh!

Update: Here’s Andrew Gelman’s version.

Fer fuck’s sake: The Ungreening Of America.

Andre Agassi on hating tennis. He had to face the dragon (a souped up ball machine modified by his father that would shoot at 110 mph) at seven (!) years old:

My father has deliberately made the dragon fearsome. He’s given it an extra-long neck of aluminum tubing, and a narrow aluminum head, which recoils like a whip every time the dragon fires. He’s also set the dragon on a base several feet high and moved it flush against the net, so the dragon towers above me. I’m small for my age, but when standing before the dragon, I look tiny. Feel tiny. Helpless.

My father wants the dragon to tower over me not simply to command my attention and respect. He wants balls that shoot from the dragon’s mouth to land at my feet as if dropped from an airplane. The trajectory makes the balls nearly impossible to return in a conventional way: I need to hit every ball on the rise, or else it will bounce over my head. But even that’s not enough for my father. Hit earlier, he yells. Hit earlier.

My father yells everything twice, sometimes three times, sometimes 10. Harder, he says, harder. But what’s the use? No matter how hard I hit a ball, no matter how early, another ball comes back. Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court. Not hundreds. Thousands. They roll toward me in perpetual waves. I have no room to turn, to step, to pivot. I can’t move without stepping on a ball—yet I can’t step on a ball, because my father won’t bear it. Step on one of my father’s tennis balls and he’ll howl as if you stepped on his eyeball.

Holy crap.

Monumentally sad and depressing. Chris Jordan photographs dead albatross chicks, killed because their parents fed them our plastic garbage:

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

For example:

We suck. (via josh spear)

Wired is running a great story on why it sucks for all of us that the anti-vaccine movement continues to gather steam. Long and fascinating, but if you’re pressed for time here’s my crude, one-sided, nutshell attempt:

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise.

…

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

…

Ah, risk. It is the idea that fuels the anti-vaccine movement — that parents should be allowed to opt out, because it is their right to evaluate risk for their own children. It is also the idea that underlies the CDC’s vaccination schedule — that the risk to public health is too great to allow individuals, one by one, to make decisions that will impact their communities. (The concept of herd immunity is key here: It holds that, in diseases passed from person to person, it is more difficult to maintain a chain of infection when large numbers of a population are immune.)

…

All you have to do to get the measles is to inhabit the airspace of a contagious person within two hours of them being there.

…

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

P.S. The immunocompromised are particularly hosed by the unvaccinated.

The prospect of using Google Books they way you might an actual library looks bleak:

Start with dates. To take GB’s word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’ La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, Fodor’s Guide to Nova Scotia, and the Portuguese edition of the book version of Yellow Submarine, to name just a few.

(via tmn)

Goddammit, I thought we were done with this shit.

Doomsday scenario #842:

…a year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

As if I didn’t have enough to fret over. Not to mention the indignity of having civilization shattered by something called “plasma balls.”

Atul Gawande’s article in The New Yorker on solitary confinement is excellent:

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

Also, from The Book Bench, Charles Dickens’ take:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

James Surowiecki explains why nobody wants the bastards to get their bonuses, even if it would (theoretically) be better for the economy:

Myriad experiments in behavioral economics have found that people are willing to pay to punish members of a group whom they believe to be shirkers or free-riders. In other words, people are willing to make themselves worse off (they have to pay their own money) in order to ensure that others don’t get undeserved rewards. Economists call this “altruistic punishment” (because the punishers are putting the interests of the group ahead of their own interest), and argue that it played an important role in fostering cooperation. So even if people believed that getting the AIG bonuses back would be a net loss for the economy, chances are they’d still want to do it.

NYTimes, Pathogens in Our Pork, on the appearance of MRSA in our food supply:

We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

Attempts to change this have been blocked by agribusiness, as you can only pack animals into crowded, unsanitary conditions if you pump them full of antibiotics.

Michael Lewis, always a must-read, on Iceland. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectively went bust, I spoke to a man at the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Reykjavík to determine if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation. He’d never been to Iceland, knew nothing about the place, and said he needed a map to find it. He has spent his life dealing with famously distressed countries, usually in Africa, perpetually in one kind of financial trouble or another. Iceland was entirely new to his experience: a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history. “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”

Looks great if you run it through the Readability bookmarklet, which you really must install if you haven’t already.

The NY Times has a couple good (but unfortunate) data visualizations up: The Geography of a Recession (related article) and Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller?

Just yesterday I was talking to my dad and brother about how painful it can be to catch your finger between two neodymium (rare earth) magnets, and that was just talking about little ones. Then, today, what should cross my aggregator but these very graphic images of Dirk’s accident. He had his fingertip crushed off when two of his large magnets slammed together. He thought he was safe because they were almost two feet apart before it happened. (via waxy)

The Big Picture has a fantastic set up, Scenes from Pakistan. The great photography is offset by the grim news:

The government of Pakistan announced on Monday that it would accept Islamic Sharia Law to be implemented in its Swat Valley region, as part of a truce with local Taliban leaders. Militants had been demanding Sharia law, attacking opponents, burning scores of girls’ schools and banning many forms of entertainment. Gun battles between Pakistani security forces and militants have killed hundreds, while up to a third of the valley’s 1.5 million people have fled.

Today’s “oh, crap” moment is brought to you by The Economist: America’s Mortgage Misery Spreads. Yikes.

By now these articles have almost certainly made the rounds, but just in case you missed them Michael Lewis’s articles on the financial crisis are must-reads: The End of Wall Street’s Boom, The End of the Financial World as We Know It, and How to Repair a Broken Financial World.

Nobody else has done a better job of describing the lunacy that brought us to this in such a vivid and gripping way.

Some choice bits, starting with Steve Eisman’s description of the engine of doom:

“You have to understand this,” he says. “This was the engine of doom.” Then he draws a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. “I cannot fucking believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years,” Eisman says.

Eisman knows enough to short the BBB tranche, but then he has dinner with a C.D.O. scumbag who reveals the gruesome twist, “I love it when you guys short my market. Without you, I don’t have anything to buy.” And that is why we’re so screwed:

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

I had like 10 other passages I was going to quote here, but really, go read ‘em all. Those bits are from the first article. Wait until you get to the others and you read about how Paulson has been spending the bailout money.

Tagging this post “sucks“ doesn’t feel adequate. I need a “suckssuckssucks” tag.

Alexandra Penney on being financially raped by Madoff (here’s her follow up).

Wow, the comments are truly YouTubesque in their quality and sensitivity. Remind me, if I ever strike it rich, to never tell anyone.

National Geographic, The Real Price of Gold …

… on being a Peruvian miner:

For 30 days he faces the dangers that have killed many of his fellow miners—explosives, toxic gases, tunnel collapses—to extract the gold that the world demands. Apaza does all this, without pay, so that he can make it to today, the 31st day, when he and his fellow miners are given a single shift, four hours or maybe a little more, to haul out and keep as much rock as their weary shoulders can bear. Under the ancient lottery system that still prevails in the high Andes, known as the cachorreo, this is what passes for a paycheck: a sack of rocks that may contain a small fortune in gold or, far more often, very little at all.

… on how much there is:

Part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, is that there is so little of it. In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years.

… on payday:

Together, father and daughter watch the miller perform his ancient art. Using his bare hands, the man swirls several pounds of liquid mercury into a wooden pan to separate the gold from the rock, dumping the mercury-tainted waste into a stream beneath the shed. Thirty feet downstream a young girl is filling up a plastic bottle in the rancid water. But inside the miller’s shed all eyes are focused on the marble-size silvery nugget the miller produces: its mercury-coated exterior hides an unknown quantity of gold.

Ended up being worth about $20.

Hertzberg on Blagojevich. Wow. I don’t even know what to excerpt. Blagojevich’s musing about what a fair price for Obama’s senate seat would be? His reaction when told Obama wouldn’t be coughing up? The contrast with NY? Oh what the heck, when in doubt, go with the profanity:

Blagojevich—who had remarked of the Senate seat, “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing”—was not happy when told that no offers were forthcoming from anyone around “this motherfucker,” as he referred to the President-elect: “Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.”

You wouldn’t buy our shitty cars…

Sigh. Not that I’m against a bailout—perhaps a necessary evil given the current climate—but one of the terms of the bailout should be the execs of those companies being dragged through the streets behind SUVs. Not fatally, I guess, just humiliatingly. There should be nakedness and abrasions involved.

Outrageous. Maybe the trans fat companies will be next.

Independent.co.uk, The World's Rubbish Dump:

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

Disgustingly unsurprising White House waterboarding stance. If you didn't read it the first time I posted it, now would be a good time to read this account from a guy who waterboard himself.

Wow, this was fun. Yesterday I couldn't send e-mail (although every other Internet function worked), so I tried using Road Runner's "live chat" option to see what was up. I was lucky enough to draw "Chris H" from the pool of support people. Here's our transcript (two lines moved to clear up chronology, otherwise unedited):

Chris H: What technical issue can I assist you with today?

Jim: Hi. Haven't been able to send mail since this morning. Can receive mail, and all other Internet services work. Thunderbird throws this error: "The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server mail.adelphia.net failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your SMTP server setting is correct and try again, or else contact your network administrator."

Jim: I tried online chat with you folks earlier, and was advised to switch my accounts/settings from adelphia.net to roadrunner.com servers, but that didn't solve the problem, and also appeared to break incoming mail.

Chris H: Lets see what we can do to address this. Unfortunately we cannot assist with Thunderbird. Make sure you entered pop-server.roadrunner.com and smtp-server.roadrunner.com instead of "mail.roadrunner.com.

Jim: Yes, that is what I had done. I have since switched back to adelphia.net settings because the change [1] didn't solve the problem of not being able to send mail, and [2] broke my ability to receive mail.

Jim: (re: [2], I had sent myself a test message which didn't show up until I changed the settings back)

Chris H: As we cannot assist with Thunderbird I can only suggest trying to disable your firewall or e-mail scanning within your antivirus software and use the correct server names.

Jim: Hmm. That is not very helpful. I have been using Thunderbird and this antivirus tool for months without issue. My computer configuration has not changed since Friday, when e-mail was working fine. All other Internet services work. Are you sure you aren't having problems with SMTP on your end?

Chris H: Yes. Did you wish to troubleshoot your issue?

Jim: Isn't that what we're doing?

Chris H: I'm asking because you are intent on blaming the servers instead of trying the options I have presented.

Jim: I have told you I already tried the options you presented.

Chris H: Then you may wish to try it in a supported e-mail program such as Outlook Express so that I can assisr you with your issue. And you didn't say you tried what I said. You said "my computer configuration has not changed since Friday".

Jim: I think if you re-read the history you'll see where I tried the server settings you suggested in my previous online chat earlier today.

Chris H: And if you do the same you will see that I am referring to disabling your firewall and e-mail scanning.

Jim: Did that too.

Chris H: Then try the last option I mentioned.

Jim: Switching to Outlook?

Chris H: Yes.

Jim: No thanks. Will call later and hopefully get someone more helpful.

Jim: Hey, look at that. E-mail works now with no changes on my end. It was something on your end.

Chris H: Incorrect.

Chris H: No one within Road Runner assists with Thunderbird so you will not be able to do that. If you are unwilling to troubleshoot your issue that is, of course, your choice.

Chris H: Are there any other technical issues I can assist you with?

Jim: Can you give me an explanation for how it magically fixed itself, then?

Chris H: If you are still using the Adelphia servers they will eventually be taken down completely so your settings will definitely not work.

Jim: Then that is a separate issue.

Chris H: Computer's "magically" work and not work all of the time. It's how they function.

Jim: No, they are deterministic.

Chris H: /byue

Jim: Wow, I can't wait to forward this chat around!

At this point Chris H. replied "Please do. Have a nice day." and then he cut the chat window, making it disappear. I knew this would happen from the last time though (chatting with someone else), so I had already grabbed a copy.

"It's how they function." Beautiful.

Ugh. This one, unfortunately, is easy to write up:

• Lost 'em all. Pool play losses: half-of-Boston, Big Ego, Bro White, and Chuck Wagon. Play-in loss: New Noise. That bounced us down to the open div. bracket, but our opponents didn't show (Dartmouth Alums) so we called it a day. A few of us stuck around and ended up picking up with Big Ego for their consolation game (they were down to 9 players and had just lost a close one in the quarters). Lost that one too, to GLUM.
• Personally, worst tournament ever (no hyperbole). I've had bad games, I've even had bad days, but never before have I had an entire bad tournament. Every game on Saturday was disastrous. I was relatively pleased with my Sunday play against New Noise, and I was point-blocked twice in that game! That should give you some idea of how poorly things went for me.

On the team front, attrition hurt. Thought we were going to have 14 players, but two of our best athletes had to cancel at the last minute. Apparently it doesn't pay to be among our best athletes, as we lost two more of them over the course of Saturday (one early, one late). Then one of our top handlers by halftime of the play-in game on Sunday, leaving us with nine.

As for my abysmal performance, lots of factors. I've been struggling with a groin pull, and haven't been playing in an attempt to get it healthy. I've probably played five times since the fall, and I'm simply not one of those players who can get away with that. Time to ignore the groin and get on the field more often. Also, my mental game was atrocious. I don't think I made a single play (even routine catches or throws) where some part of my brain (sometimes a large part) wasn't thinking "okay, don't screw this up." You know what that leads to.

Actually, what it leads to is this: for the Chuck Wagon game one of our more sadistic players hit on the idea of having to play in your spandex underlayer with your shirt tucked in for a point if you screwed up. I ended up doing the honors pretty damn early. Kinda helped, in a "rose goes in the front, big guy" kind of way.

Finally, this is probably old news, but this weekend I heard that Jeff Graham tore his ACL. Such news is always bad, but in his case it made me particularly, inexplicably sad. "Inexplicably" because I've never met the guy, I've only seen him play. But he's obviously in tremendous shape, is so much fun to watch, and clearly takes great joy in the game. Also, by all accounts, he's one of the nicest guys around. ACL tears are just so random. One minute you're on top of the world, then you land a bit funny, and your season's over. It doesn't matter how hard you work, or what kind of shape you're in. Intelligent Design my ass. Sigh. Anyway, here's to Jeff's speedy recovery.

After watching this poor guy's YouTube video I certainly won't be using Paypal to sell anything. Worth watching and forwarding along. « via Sixfoot6 »

From The New Yorker, Deal Sweeteners:

What's stopping the U.S. from doing the same [distilling better ethanol from sugarcane rather than corn]? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it's not cost-effective to use it for ethanol. And the tariffs and quotas for imported sugar mean that no one can afford to import foreign sugar and turn it into ethanol, the way that oil refiners import crude from the Middle East to make gasoline. Americans now import eighty per cent less sugar than they did thirty years ago. So the prospects for a domestic-sugar ethanol industry are dim at best.

Interesting. And, like so many interesting things involving politics and special interests, depressing.

They banned playing Tag? They banned TAG?!!. And not just Tag:

Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.

Liable? I'd be tempted to sue the school for preventing my kids from running around. You want to ban something from the school? Ban soda. Ban trans fat. But running? Outrageous.

UPDATE: The LA Times is running a good opinion piece on this.

On 9/10 and 9/11 ABC will air a docudrama called The Path to 9/11. In it you will "learn" that the CIA had bin Laden in a house, literally surrounded, called the White House for authorization to take him out, and the Clinton administration refused to grant the authorization. Complete fabrication, "Straight Out of Disney and Fantasyland." I wouldn't expect anything factual from something labelled a "docudrama", but c'mon...

Via Waxy links, from the who-on-earth-thought-this-was-a-good-idea department, AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data. They pulled it, but it's too late. The data is in the wild. Here's a search engine and some profile musing. User #711931's log is justifiably referred to as "epic". Finally, Cynical-C notes that the NY Times uncovered AOL searcher #4417749. Perhaps, if I were the tattooing sort (and the AOL searching sort), I'd get my AOL search number on a barcode on the back of my neck. Amazing.

Homeless James from Virginia:

i took to james immediately. he is friendly, open and warm. he says he'll have my back if i should ever need him. he introduced me to his friends as he walked the street looking for a fix. he says he has "a lot of hatred and a lot of happiness." he agrees it's a strange mix.

he doesn't mind people taking his picture. "people say it's stealing your soul; but my soul ain't worth nothing."

but he says he thinks he has goodness in him. "i'm a motherfucker, but i'm good to women and old people. i always give up my seat on the bus. and i'm good to my friends."

James is dying of colon cancer. More on the clickthrough. Speechless.

Twenty-nine percent?! That can't be right. That 50.000001% of the population that voted the dude back into office for a second term couldn't have dwindled that much. I mean, the folks that voted for him two years ago must have been frickin' True Believers. Did 42% of them really just dry up and blow away? If so, why? It's not like the last two years have been any different from the first four years.

Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse...

How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam:

Still, Worley, faced with an e-mail that would, according to federal authorities, eventually lead him to join a gang of Nigerian criminals seeking to defraud U.S. banks, didn't hesitate. A few minutes after receiving Mbote's entreaty, he replied, "I can help and I am interested." His only question was how Mbote had found him, and he seemed satisfied with the explanation: that the South African Department of Home Affairs had supplied his name.

Seven hundred billion dollars:

The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week.

Seven. Hundred. Billion. Dollars.

I'm thinking we could have spent that money better.

I was going to make a joke about how big a wall we could have built around the US, but wasn't willing to put in the work.

Tough to watch.

Shee-it (emphasis added):

Last year, patient care director Colleen Becker decided to check the numbers. She looked at a daily hospital census—about one-third of the 900 patients weighed 350 pounds or more.

Startled, Becker checked another date, then another.

The numbers were consistent. On some days, half the patients were obese. Some weighed 500 pounds or more.

"We ran the data again to make sure we weren't hallucinating," Becker said. "We weren't. So we had to somehow figure out the appropriate supplies, equipment, training and care for the patients we're dealing with."

So here's an idea: tax credits for fitness. To qualify, if you're fit, your doctor gives you a form you can attach to your return at your annual checkup. I'm betting any economic loss in tax revenue would be offset by the reduced obesity-related burdens on our health care system (the economic damage goes far beyond hospitals buying reinforced beds and such).

Wow, you can make Garfield funny! Scientists still doubt it's possible to make Opus funny though. God, how I hate that strip. It's not so much that it sucks, it's that Breathed has the stature that it is allowed to suck over an entire half-page of the comics. Every weekend my Sunday morning mood gets dented because there's no way to avoid the damn thing. Even though I studiously don't read it, it's still there in my periphery, all bloated and gassy. Sure, the guy can draw, but come on!

I did used to like Bloom County though.

Feel like your credit card number is safe because you don't shop on the Internet? Guess again. Any time morons are involved, nothing is safe. And morons are always involved.

146 Reasons Why Sugar Is Ruining Your Health. If only I couldn't think of 146 desserts that just wouldn't be the same without sugar.