Pew News IQ Quiz

I am bit of a sucker for these little quizzes that pop up on the internet from time to time, as long as they do not take more than a couple of minutes to complete and are not totally idiotic. Since I am a news junkie, I was tempted to do this short 13-question Pew News IQ quiz to assess whether you know more about the news than the average American. This is an admittedly low bar so this is one of those quizzes where doing well does not bring any credit at all. [Read more…]

Blacklists then and now

In his keynote talk at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress (30C3) conference last month to an audience that consisted to a large extent of computer professionals and systems administrators, Glenn Greenwald talked about one encouraging sign that he has observed, and that is the increased resistance he has observed among ordinary people, especially those in the tech industry. [Read more…]

So predictable

Every year we have the same sequence of events. There will be a few days in succession when temperatures fall far below average values, combined with fairly heavy snowfall. This is what we who live in the northeast call ‘winter’. And sure enough, this will be followed by amusement among some members of the media that this conclusively proves that global warming is some gigantic hoax being perpetrated on the US by a conspiracy of scientists, liberals, and the rest of the world. [Read more…]

Why not recruit normal human beings instead?

In the service sector where employees have to interact with the general public, it has long been recognized that it is much easier to teach employees the skills they need to actually carry out their jobs than to teach them the kind of good attitude that will make a positive impact on customers. So “hire for attitude and teach the skills” has been a useful aphorism for them. [Read more…]

The costs and benefits of school closings

Making the decision to close schools for bad weather, as many regions in the US did last Tuesday due to the bitterly cold freeze, is not easy. The prime considerations of course are the temperature and snow and ice levels. As to the first, it is not the predicted daytime high temperature that should be used as a gauge, since that is usually reached only by the mid afternoon when students and workers are returning home in daylight and people have had time to do some clean up, but the low temperatures of the previous night, since that is closer to the temperature in the early morning when children are headed off to school. Last Tuesday, that temperature in Cleveland was -8oF (–22oC), which is pretty cold. [Read more…]

Busted

Rodd Scheinerman put some chicken nuggets in the toaster oven, turned it on, and left the room with the camera running. Why did he do this? A roast had disappeared out of the oven a few weeks earlier and while he had suspicions about who was responsible, he needed proof and so he set up a sting operation to catch the culprit in the act. [Read more…]

Living for the attaboy

David Simon is a successful screenwriter of political dramas and in a blog post he writes what I too have felt all along, that even under the remote chance that New Jersey governor Chris Christie did not explicitly and personally order the closing of the lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September, thus massively tying up traffic for four days right at the beginning of the school year, now that we know that its was deliberately ordered by his close political aides as an act of retribution for whatever reason, the nature of the political relationships within the coterie of people close to major political figures strongly suggests that Christie would have been informed immediately afterwards, thus making a lie of his claim that he did not know anything about this until the story of the emails broke on Wednesday. [Read more…]