Newmark's Door

"I'm An Idiot." (Xkcd cartoon.)

"Charting the Wired World." (Wired cartoons.)

Blogger Jeff Atwood asks, "[W]hen does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem?"

His answer is "As a general rule, I'd say almost always."

"Republican Strategy: Just Have Nancy Pelosi Continue to Explain the Stimulus". (Via Instapundit.)

William Easterly has a new blog, Aid Watch.

And Professor Easterly will be giving the John W. Pope lecture, "The Poor Have a Dream: Freedom for All and the Escape from Global Poverty," at NC State on February 23. (And he will give another talk at State on the 24th.)

"Brown rice and chicken sausage are the low-fat substitutes that update this Southern classic."

I'd heard the ones about cancer before, but I hadn't heard this:

Asked in an experiment to guess how many abortions occur in the US for every million live births, students gave a wide range of answers. At the middle of the range was an estimate of 5,000. That figure is so far from the correct answer - 335,000 - that, in the words of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it is "not even wrong."

But I used to give a quiz to one of my classes with similar questions. For example: how many battle deaths did the U.S. suffer in the Vietnam War?

I had quite a few college students--I forget the exact percentage, but I think it was 20 percent or so--answer more than 500,000. 

And they each had exactly as many votes as I do.

California and Florida oranges, and California lemons, are threatened by a nasty bug.

There may be a "shortage" of chicken wings for the Super Bowl this Sunday.

Tristan da Cunha:

The island is so small that cartographers can't even put it on their maps (not enough resolution). Located in the South Atlantic between Africa and South America, this volcanic outcropping has the honor of being the remotest inhabited island on the planet, and that's including Antarctica and the North Pole. One of the islands in the archipelago is called "Inaccessible", which only seems appropriate, together with their motto: "Our faith is our strength."

I think labeling Mr. Lewis a failure is premature. But his reputation as a business genius has taken a big hit. (A Wall Street Journal columnist adds details.)

My wife and I used to have a little Bank of America stock. But after he bought Merrill, he started talking about how big Bank of America now was and how cool it was that they were so really, really big.  It sounded like the locker room talk of high school boys.

So I sold our BAC on September 26. At $35.40/share. I'm no business genius, but that's looking like a pretty good move.