"We’re very excited to announce the Public Terabyte Dataset project."

"The question should not be, “is Rails a safe choice,” but “[how long] can we justify the expense of traditional development approaches.”"

"Though one of our most ancient holidays, Halloween wasn’t celebrated widely in America until the latter part of the 1800s. Ypsilanti likely didn’t celebrate Halloween for half a century after the city’s founding in 1823—the quote above is the first Halloween story to appear in old newspapers dating back to the 1840s."

"So what happens next? >The House Financial Services Committee has refused to publish his testimony, offering “the dog ate my homework” level excuses, first that they hadn’t gotten it, then that it was in the wrong format, then that their IT department was experiencing difficulties (always a good one when real reasons are running thin). The last one was pure Catch-22: that he had gotten his written testimony in too late."

"It is common enough to look at debt as a percentage of GDP, DPI, etc. but that's so… impersonal. So here are a couple of (very scary) charts that look at things from a dollars per person perspective (click on charts to enlarge)."