"Not that anyone involved in these transactions is a war profiteer, mind you—they’re merely taking a lemon (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and learning how to make extremely profitable lemonade (the first Gulf War)."

"What that means is web designers can get easy access to creative fonts without having to spend the time preparing images or Flash files to render them, ideally resulting in time and cost savings in the design stage. It should also provide a more lightweight experience for your web server, because it won’t have to serve up the comparatively heavyweight image or Flash files to render a variety of design-quality fonts."

"Riddle me this, Batman: If you put Linux on your Windows XP computer, is it now a new computer, a new machine? Take a look. Nope. Same old dent on the bottom, same stickers next to the keyboard. Latch is loose. Duh. Same machine."

"16 But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants."

"Extrasolar planets are not named and are referred to only by their assigned scientific designation. The reason given by the IAU to not name the planets is that it is considered impractical as planets are expected to be common. I advance some reasons as to why this logic is flawed, and suggest names for the 403 extrasolar planet candidates known as of Oct 2009. The names follow a scheme of association with the constellation that the host star pertains to, and therefore are mostly drawn from Roman-Greek mythology. Other mythologies may also be used given that a suitable association is established."

"One of the discussants in Brain and Behavioral Sciences of Seth Roberts's article on self-experimentation was by Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher. They had a bunch of negative things to say about self-experimentation, but as a statistician, I was struck by their concern about "the overuse of the loess procedure." I think lowess (or loess) is just wonderful, and I don't know that I've ever seen it overused."

"This page contains links to some of the most useful free software and open-source software for operations research and industrial engineering."

"We can see the problem we face by looking at the continued silo-ization of instant messaging. Check out this list of instant messaging protocols. It’s a mess because so many of the commonly-used platforms are still, in 2009, private silos. Tweeting today is in many ways like instant messaging was when the only way you could do it was with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and ICQ. All were silos, with little if any interoperabiity. With tweeting we do have interop, and that’s why tweeting has taken off while IM stays stagnant. XMPP helped a lot (it’s why you can see Google IMs in Adium, for example). But we don’t have NEA with Twitter, and that’s why tweeting is starting to stagnate, and developers like Dave are working on getting past it."

"Recovery.gov can’t bootstrap itself out of this circular trap. But if we use the tags that it has helpfully provided, we might be able to find out a lot more about where the money is going."