"The core of this wonderful museum is the Reuleaux collection of mechanisms and machines, a set of 19th century models built to demonstrate the elements of machine motion (more collections here). Also of interest are the tutorials and this extensive list of online references."

"Think back to the dot-com era, when venture capitalists were spending all their money laying fiber-optic cable under the street. The right solution wasn’t for the Fed to raise interest rates until even punch-drunk venture capitalists could realize all this investment in fiber wouldn’t be profitable. The right solution was to take their money away. Give it to the poor, who will spend it on something useful, like food and clothing.

So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs."

"People forget what the markets were like in the late 1970's when the pits were dead and the average person wanted nothing to do with the US equity markets. The creation of 401k's and more gambling tables like the options exchanges helped to perk things up. This latest generation of jokers will not stop until they have trashed the markets once again."

"We used to gasp at the way the Soviet Union stuck opponents of the regime in asylums. But the USSR is not the only country in history that has had a hard time seeing its adversaries as rational. The present generation of Americans is made uncomfortable by the idea that their country might have enemies whose enmity is the result of something other than fanaticism or mental illness. Maj Hasan’s colleagues, the Economist writes, say he thought the war on terror was a war on Islam. According to what we think Islam is, he is wrong. But according to a fundamentalist idea of what Islam is, he is right. There is rationality in such enmity, even if that rationality is built on different assumptions."

"Everybody else has to stay in Special Torture Jail forever on accounta they have all come down with Schrodinger's Guilt. If they stay in the box they might be guilty, but if we open the box they might not be."

"The i7 even represents a sizable (35%) performance increase over the i5 model and costs only $200 more. In fact, the i7 iMac benchmarks compare favorably to 2.93Ghz Quad-Core Mac Pro which costs significantly more."

"I can't tell you how bizarre it is to see arguments I used to hear coming from the mouths of Montana Freemen like LeRoy Schweitzer in the 1990s — arguments that led to him embarking on an 81-day armed standoff with federal authorities, and resulting in him spending the rest of his natural life in a federal prison — coming from supposedly mainstream talk-show hosts on Fox News only 13 years later."

"Unemployed per job posting in the top 50 U.S. metros."

"Pot does not kill anyone, and he would have been content to make that his substitute for the mood-altering he seemed to have to have. But he was compelled to give it up, and now he is dead.

This fine man was 49 years old and leaves behind a young widow, mother and hundreds of grieving friends. He was loved by many for his gentleness and many charitable endeavors."

"As noted on that page, we urge you to do two things. First, be aware that Apple is acting as a gatekeeper, and preventing you from getting the software that developers such as ourselves are trying to provide you. We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple. All the while, our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There’s no other word for that but “broken”."

"Columbia University's Computer Vision Labaratory is testing out a product called the BigShot, a digital camera intended to be taken apart and assembled by children, in order to remind them that yeah, someone actually designed and built this thing."

"…We find that award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, both relative to their prior performance and relative to a matched sample of non-winning CEOs. At the same time, they extract more compensation following the awards, both in absolute amounts and relative to other top executives in their firms. They also spend more time on public and private activities outside their companies, such as assuming board seats or writing books. The incidence of earnings management increases after winning awards. The effects are strongest in firms with weak corporate governance. Our results suggest that the ex post consequences of media-induced superstar status for shareholders are negative."