Newmark's Door

The 43rd Mersenne prime has been identified. (But the $100K prize for finding a 10-million-digit prime is still available.)

Read about the biggest blogger of them all, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga ("Daily Kos") from a source that should be sympathetic.

(For a reply from Mr. Zuniga, go here.)

For some sharp comments from an opposing point of view, see Mark at Decision '08.

Kurt Andersen of New York magazine wants to like Hillary Clinton. He does. Truly, he really, really does.

But he's having trouble overlooking her blatant phoniness.

Google is hiring smart people like nobody's business.

Google is gobbling up bandwidth and storage like nobody's business.

The one, the only, P. J. O'Rourke:

You see, the real reason I became a communist was to impress girls. Back then, all the pretty ones were revolutionaries. One of the things that's gone wrong for the Left is that their girls just aren't cute any more.

James Surowiecki reviews the Blackberry patent-infringement case.

These stories seem to be popping up more frequently recently: a big donor and a university are having a fight.

Unfortunately, some of us--and our friends and relatives--are getting to the age where this might be useful information: John Palmer summarizes the warning signs of a stroke and what to do.

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, news of an interesting new study that concludes “This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more left wing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more right wing.”

Only performed, apparently, on British and German data.  (The full academic papers are available here.) It'll just be a matter of weeks until somebody tries this with American data.

But I'll report that in the Newmark household there are two data points against the weak version of the hypothesis and one against even the strong--based on "switchers"--version.

And I don't believe it, but I don't have a ready alternative explanation for the data.