And you are here why?

From Wonkette Romney won because he was less stupid than Perry and Bachmann and more superstitious than Huntsman. Romney became the nominee the same way Ramen noodles become dinner: There’s nothing else around, and you have to pick something. And the Hot Pockets believe in evolution. Stroke of genius....

From National Geographic , comes this amazing video of a Cheetah, in full sprint, in slow-mo. Because while cats are cool, big cats are even cooler (video below)

From the Tubes of You A remix video of over 100 science fiction movies. This took about a month of editing. In regards to the weird aspect ratio, we had to crop it because we were working with so many weird formats. The song is the Glitch Mob remix "Monday," original by Nalepa Mind you, I'm not too sure that these are all good SF movies, but hey, there are still plenty of iconic ones in there...

aka: Why women red-state women support gay marriage (video below)

Dave Troy has a couple of fascinating charts showing voting patterns vs population density  from this election - and the results should be pretty alarming for Republicans. First, the election results (click to embiggen. A lot) Note that below 800 people per square mile, people vote Republican, but above it, people vote Democratic. (Ignore the x-axis scale changing at 190 - otherwise the chart would get huge ). Or, to put this slightly differently, any densely populated area will vote Democratic .  But, we pretty much knew this, i.e., your default election results tend to show that the sparsely populated states are all Red, and the highly populated states are all blue (with the rest somewhere in between) Looking at this a wee bit deeper though makes things a whole lot more interesting. I'll let Dave explain this himself Studying this graph, two important facts are revealed.   First, there are very few cities in red states. Second, the few dense cities that do exis

From J.L. Wall Tony Kushner (...) will,at best, be remembered like Arthur Miller for having had genius perch on his shoulder just long enough to write one remarkable play.

via David & Christina Romer, we have this Region:   You recently wrote a very intriguing paper about the interplay between tax changes and government spending. Would you give us a brief description? David Romer:   [...] In the context of the starve-the-beast theory, my favorite example of the issue of correlation versus causation is the fiscal history of the Korean War. The North invaded the South at the end of June 1950. A month later Truman took a few minutes out from planning the military response and wrote to Congress to say that we needed a massive tax increase because we were going to have to ramp up military spending. A big tax increase was passed and put into effect three months after the invasion. [...] So if you look just at the data, you see that taxes went up and spending went up afterwards. If you look at correlation, it looks like a great example of tax changes causing spending to change in the same direction. But if you listen to the history I just described,

From the BBC , we have the sad tale of Japanese Ninjas (Ninjae?) who are, apparently, going extinct. Apparently, the leaders of the two remaining clans of Ninjae - the  Masaaki Hatsumi of the Togakure clan Jinichi Kawakami of the Koka clan - have no successors. It looks like soon there can be only None :-( From the article --> Both Kawakami and Hatsumi are united on one point. Neither will appoint anyone to take over as the next ninja grandmaster. "In the age of civil wars or during the Edo period, ninjas' abilities to spy and kill, or mix medicine may have been useful," Kawakami says. "But we now have guns, the internet and much better medicines, so the art of ninjutsu has no place in the modern age." As a result, he has decided not to take a protege. He simply teaches ninja history part-time at Mie University. Despite having so many pupils, Mr Hatsumi, too, has decided not to select an heir.

 From the NY Times , we have this gem " Man Denies Cooking His Wife " The story, of course, is appropriately gruesome A 68-year-old man pleaded not guilty Wednesday to murdering his wife after the police found her severed head in a freezer and her body parts cooking on the stove at their Oceanside home. The man, Frederick Hengl, looked frail as he entered his plea, and his lawyer has requested he receive medical attention, according to U-T San Diego. The police said they responded to neighbors’ complaints about a foul odor coming from the couple’s two-bedroom, bungalow-style house Friday morning. The first officer entered the home and saw three pans on the stove that turned out to contain parts of the victim, Anna Faris, 73. The authorities have not yet determined how she died. The district attorney, Katherine Flaherty, said there was no evidence of cannibalism. Mr. Hengl remained jailed in $5 million bail. Still...

I know, shooting fish in a barrel, but, seriously, who on earth actually goes to see this things? And why?  For gods sakes, why ? Note, the descriptions are straight from IMDB.  Sometimes, no embellishment is necessary. The story of a woman who loves her dog more than her husband. And then her husband loses the dog. (In the running for worst movie of 2012 ) A swinger on the cusp of being a senior citizen with a taste for young women falls in love with an accomplished woman closer to his age.   After he's fired from his job, an everyday guy faces pressure from his wife to have a baby and from his mom, who has decided to move in with the young couple. A meddling mother tries to set her daughter up with the right man so her kid won't follow in her footsteps. (Special mention as the Worst Movie of 2007 ) Three female employees of the Federal Reserve plot to steal money that is about to be destroyed. (Special mention - 3rd worst movie of 2008 )

Asawin Suebsaeng and Dave Gilson have put together the definitive collection of Obama-related conspiracy theories .  The venn-diagram below encapsulates is a handy-dandy reference, but I'd encourage you to go to the source to get the details behind each one.  Remember kids, if its on the internet, it must be true! THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES Disclaimer: It should go without saying that none of these are true. Follow links at your own risk. Obama is a secret Muslim:   This one began right after he took the stage at the 2004 Democratic convention, with chain emails   alleging   his "true" religious affiliation. The rumor soon found its way onto the popular conservative online forum Free Republic, and took on a whole new life in the years to come. Related: Obama secretly   speaks Arabic ,   attended a madrassa   as a kid in Indonesia, referred to   "my Muslim faith"   in an interview, and was sworn in   on a Koran .   Obama's bringing 100 million Mu

Ross Douthat seems to have thrown his hat into the ring for the " Clueless Asshat of the Year " award with his latest troll entitled " The Liberal Gloat ".  To quote The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general. Which of course brings to mind those other "unchurched" Americans - you know, the Hindus, Sikhs, Moslems, Buddhists, Jews, etc. who - collectively - happen to, really, not be " underemployed working-class...(with a)... disconnection from community in general ". On the contrary, Hindus and Jews are (by far!) some of the wealthiest religious groups in the US (chart at the bottom), and Buddhists beat out Christians (not by much, but

I spent an hour or so this morning with an acquaintance of mine (who is of the Fox/Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh persuasion) discussing l'affaire Petraeus , and I have to admit the conspiracy theory he spun, while absolutely banoodles, was seriously fascinating. I can't recall most of it, but as far as I can recall, it went something like this Obama, being Muslim, is intent on arming the various splinter factions in the Middle-East Ambassador Stevens was sent to Libya to set up a gun-running operation, funneling arms to Libyan rebels Once Stevens had set up the arms pipeline ( somehow involving Russia. I didn't quite get this part ), he wanted to come back to the U.S. Obama, however, wanted him to go to Syria to arm Assad ( I couldn't figure this part out - I thought Obama was helping the Muslim rebels or some such ). Stevens refused on principle, because "Assad is a fascist dictator and is oppressing the people".  At this point, Stevens became expendab

The standard (Red vs Blue) map that you always see ( via Newman ) The US map squished around to make the state sizes proportional to the population ( still via Newman ) A pointillist take from Nelson . Click to embiggen (a lot !)   To quote "a pointillist look at the 2012 election results, which does a fairer job of illustrating where, how many, and how people voted in the election than the more typical full-color generalization." And my favorite - the map based on political Ad spending   using dollars per Voter as the metric

Remember Ted Stevens ? The Internet as a series of tubes ? Let The Daily Show helpfully remind you The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , Political Humor & Satire Blog , The Daily Show on Facebook Now, Business Insider very helpfully shows us that the Internet is, indeed, a series of tubes :-) (or, at least, Google's part thereof)...

Via Andrew Gelman and Avi Feller , we have the following chart showing the election results for four income groups (based on exit polls. Blanks indicate states that were not polled). I'll let Andrew and Avi explain the results above Lower-income voters consistently support the Democratic candidate in nearly every state. Upper-income voters, on the other hand, are more mixed in their political views: wealthy voters in Mississippi are strongly Republican while wealthy voters in Massachusetts are strongly Democratic. And now to the threatening part. Consider the following The median income in the US is $50K . Translation? Half the voters in the country are going to - overwhelmingly - support Democrats As inequality grows, the percentage of people in the >$100K will decrease. Translation? The number of people who might vote Republican will decrease   And that is a problem, and a significant one at that.  To quote Danny DeVito in " Other People's Money ", 

Seriously. Not Social Security. Not Defense. Not the DMV. Not the EPA. Not whatever other thing your average Wingnut On the Street is busy raving about. Health care and only health care. How do I know this? Well, the CBO has a new white-paper out called Options for Deficit Reduction , and it has a bunch of cool stuff in it.  But, by far the coolest part is on page 23, on an extremely non-imaginatively titled chart called (I kid you not) " Components of Non-Interest Spending Under the Extended Alternative Fiscal Scenario ". I know, I know, gorgeous bureaucratise,  right? I'll let Ezra Klein translate it for you These graphs are built atop what’s called “the current policy” baseline. The current policy baseline assumes nothing changes. We don’t pass any new laws. We don’t follow through on the hard parts — like the cost controls in the Affordable Care Act — of any of the laws we’ve already passed. We don’t raise taxes. And the result?  The charts below

Doonesbury manages to nail how I feel about being married to Nicole...

You may have heard of Project ORCA the Romney Campaign's massive high-tech Get Out The Vote effort in 2012, which failed, and spectacularly at that.  As John Ekdal put it By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM... So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help From all appearances, it was a combination of lack of robustness , lack of scalability , and a pernicious consultant culture that doomed it. This wasn't the first time I'dseen problems of this type, and it almost certainly won't be the last.  The underlying issue was pretty standard. - basically, the word "Robust" takes on a whole new meaning when failure is not  an option. This is really important, and worth repeating loudly -  

Seriously. You know what " Technical Debt " is, right? Ok, heres the (official?) Wikipedia definition   Technical debt   (also known as   design debt   or   code debt ) is a   neologistic   metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor or evolving   software architecture   and   software development   within a   codebase . The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete. As a change is started on a codebase, there is often the need to make other coordinated changes at the same time in other parts of the codebase or documentation. The other required, but uncompleted changes, are considered debt that must be paid at some point in the future. And in this - somewhat purist - sense, " Technical Debt " is absolutely valid. The problem arises in the way it is almost invariably used, viz., as an excuse to not do something. Herewith a simple exercise - the next time you hear someone cite &quo

On the 1st of October the WDR Radio Orchestra mingled with the crowds on Cologne Wallrafplatz and surprised with well-known tones from a galaxy far, far away....   Despite everything, the music still sends shivers down my spine - and I totally get the look of joy on the onlookers faces...

CNN, strangely, has some gems buried in its exit polling data from the 2012 elections .  I say strangely , because they seem to have gone full " faux wonk " in their attempt to be The Data Company, or whatever the heck their current strategy is. Anyhow, the particularly interesting bit here is the chart showing Vote By Race , which I've summarized below Vote by Race Percentage of Vote % Split for Obama % Split for Romney Other White 72 39 59 2 African-American 13 93 6 1 Latino 10 71 27 2 Asian 3 73 26 1 Other 2 58 38 4 Parsing the above just a little bit, we get into interesting territory. 59% of the White vote went for Romney.  The White vote was 72% of the total vote. And, we know that 48% of the electorate voted for Romney.  If we put these together, we get 72% of the total vote was White 59% of this group voted for Romney (or, 72 * 0.59 = 42.48% of the total vote was White and Voted for Romney ) 48% of the total vote was for Rom