Twitter’s Down

The thing about Twitter being down is that you can’t twitter about Twitter being down. How annoying!

Why I Drive A Tank

I recently purchased a 1991 Mercedes Benz 350 SDL (W126 S class). The last couple of months have seen me on the receiving end of all sorts of jibes from my friends about driving an “old man” car!

I bought the car for two reasons. First, I can, and will, convert it to run waste vegetable oil. Second, it’s a fucking tank.

This link will take you to a video from Fifth Gear wherein Tiff and Vicki simulate speeding in the fog. The clip is really unpleasant in many ways (no humans were harmed, of course). What’s interesting is that the second car they run into the pack, at 70 mph, is a W126 Mercedes. That’s the one I’d rather be in, for sure. The Fiat is downright terrifying – no chance of survivors .

Finally, this link will take you to a late-1980s W126 Mercedes television advertisement from Australia. Grim, grim carnage, but four-for-four on the survivor front.

Kill Your Television

There’s been a lot of talk of “cognitive surplus” of late. I found the numbers in this piece by Clay Shirky particularly eye-opening:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. … And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

One new Wikipedia-level achievement each weekend if we rechannel our ad-watching time. And that’s just the United States, mind you.

If Marx had lived 100 years later, I have to assume he would have been compelled to have coined, instead, that “television is the opiate of the masses”.

Office-Mate / Desk-Mate

I’m a big fan of offices that hold two people, and have had various, great office-mates over the years. But when I work at home, I tend to have a desk-mate, namely Scarlet. She’s horribly cute, but frequently in the way!

Bumper Sticker of the Day

The Opposite of an Answer

With thanks to my friend Dan for the hilarious link, anybody who finds hedge funds interesting should certainly check out this “problem set” for aspiring hedge fund managers. My favorite:

4. Days before the housing bubble bursts, you short the ABX subprime index and, when the ensuing mortgage crisis causes millions of families to lose their homes to foreclosure, you realize a $550 million profit.

Since, for you, this is the opposite of a problem, find the opposite of an answer.

Enjoy!

HRC as Spoiler

First, this piece by Keith Olbermann from MSNBC last night is just hilarious. Check it out. Tip-of-the-hat to Ray.

Second, I had a lot of fun playing with CNN’s Delegate Calculator while I ate lunch today. There’s just no rational math that gets HRC the nomination. HRC would have to trounce BO by on the order of 20 points (60% vs 40%) in every remaining primary contest and the undeclared superdelegates would have to vote for HRC at a 2:1 ratio (66% vs 33%) for HRC to clinch the nomination.

Obviously, neither of those two things are statistically probable – unless HRC has video of BO shooting up heroin with 8 year olds while playing with himself. I think that’d have been leaked by now though.

Third, and finally, Dick Morris did a great job nailing the “HRC as Spoiler” theme a couple weeks ago. HRC isn’t running today to win in 2008. She’s running today to make sure BO doesn’t get elected so that she can run in 2012 as the Democratic nominee. Plain and simple. There is no other rational explanation, IMO.

What a tool.

Quote of the Day

The difference between a smart person and a wise person is that a smart person knows what to say and a wise person knows whether or not to say it.

The Four Elements

Guns, bitches, and bling
were never part of the four elements.
And never will be.