Abortion vote ‘inevitable,’ MP says – Toronto Star Meanwhile, the anti-abortion caucus continues to work for that day, with monthly meetings over dinner on Parliament Hill. They fly so far under the radar it’s not clear how they divvy up the cost of their researcher from their parliamentary budgets or even who they count as […]
Category Archives: serious stuff
Truth in economics
Monday, May 10, 2010
John Williams: Believe Him or Not His thesis is both simple and surprisingly complex: over the course of thirty years, Washington politicians have pressured federal economists to tweak the methods by which they assess key metrics of the economy, to inflate the numbers and protect the incumbents from voters who would surely rise up in […]
Patents are bogus: another reason
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong? [The paper] looks at the putative theory that innovation comes from a direct profit motive of a single corporation looking to sell the good in market, and for that to work, the company needs to take the initial invention and get temporary […]
TV
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Clay Shirky: The Collapse of Complex Business Models There are two essential bits of background here. The first is that most TV is made by for-profit companies, and there are two ways to generate a profit: raise revenues above expenses, or cut expenses below revenues. The other is that, for many media business, that second […]
Complain about the government, but it could always be worse…
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Kafka’s Castle is collapsing | openDemocracy The saying «We have been put on earth to make Kafka come true» has been well known since Soviet times. We have been so steeped in absurdity since childhood that we haven’t even learnt to distinguish any of the rules that regulate it. We are on the other side […]
Still on the case
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Sinead O’Connor: ‘There should be a full criminal investigation of the pope’ Sinead O’Connor is still singing. And she’s still speaking out against abuse — only now her 1992 stunt on “Saturday Night Live” almost seems prescient as the Roman Catholic Church faces a growing catalog of complaints about child sexual and physical assault by […]
Punk Rock Mathematics
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics – Technoccult interviews Tom Henderson 1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over. 2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with […]
Lies, damned lies and statistics
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
We’re so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong The problem is that our statistical tools for evaluating the probability of error haven’t kept pace with our own successes, in the form of our ability to obtain massive data sets and perform multiple tests on them. Even given a low tolerance for […]
As if.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Saudis Seek Payments for Any Drop in Oil Revenues “It is like the tobacco industry asking for compensation for lost revenues as a part of a settlement to address the health risks of smoking,” said Jake Schmidt, the international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The worst of this racket is that […]
