Newmark's Door

Blogcount: How many blogs and bloggers? How big the blogosphere?

Christopher Hitchens reads a new book about JFK and is . . . appalled. JFK took major quantities of drugs.

The Duke bookstore has online listings of the required texts for courses and also lets students order them online. Very cool.

"Recently, I decided to sequence my DNA in my spare time. 'How hard can it be,' I figured. 'There must be a machine on eBay that does all the work.' Besides, for my masters thesis in computer science I had applied numerical modeling techniques to studying sea urchin embryos. I was cross-disciplinary, god damn it.

"I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Biotech protocols are more like cooking than engineering."

Balance the state budget game. (Challenging; the b****rds in the state legislature kept opposing my imaginative budget cuts.)

Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame.

Congratulations to the students and staff of Raleigh Charter High School. For this year RCHS posted the third highest SAT scores in the state. (This is a .pdf file.) State average: 1001; Wake County average: 1067; Chapel Hill High: 1175; East Chapel Hill: 1181; Broughton: 1080; Enloe: 1146; RCHS: 1190.

British writer says that despite great weather, delicious food, and cheap wine, all is not well in Italy. Two indications: 1) he claims 70% of single Italian men between the ages of 25 and 29 live at home, and 2) ". . . Italy is a land of almost unbridled anarchy. Although you are strangled by red tape and persecuted by a million arbitrarily imposed petty regulations, the rule of law does not exist."

Microsoft Word docs contain a bunch of information that users might not want revealed. Find out how to prevent this here.

Liberal big cheese Harold Meyerson excoriates Wal-Mart and extols Las Vegas. He doesn't say whether he's visited northwest Arkansas recently, but perhaps he should. (On the other hand, why would he want to confuse himself with actual data.)