“What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accor­dions, over­lays, high usabil­ity, strik­ing visual effects and all those “web 2.0″ good­ies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

This library con­tains six of the most use­ful JavaScript tools avail­able for today’s web­site. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, con­fig­ured and styled. In the end, you can have hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent wid­gets and new per­sonal ways of using the library.”

“The core of this won­der­ful museum is the Reuleaux col­lec­tion of mech­a­nisms and machines, a set of 19^th 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.”

“Accord­ing to the Cen­ter for Respon­si­ble Lend­ing, issuers are using the power they still have for a few months to imple­ment “any time any rea­son” price changes to raise the inter­est rates for large groups of customers. ”

“This isn’t as sim­ple as cut­ting out waste. The real project here is get­ting the med­ical sys­tem to define waste the same way con­sumers define waste: treat­ments that don’t help peo­ple, and in fact hurt the bot­tom line. As it is, those treat­ments cur­rently help the bot­tom line, and so are no more waste­ful for the insti­tu­tion than a Best Buy sales­man per­suad­ing you to buy an expen­sive HDMI cable you don’t need.”

“An even more strik­ing thing, per­haps, emerges in this sec­ond graph, namely that rev­enues accrued by artists them­selves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above rep­re­sent rev­enues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen notice­ably.) This is mostly because of live rev­enues, but also because of the grow­ing amount col­lected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much big­ger chunk of indus­try rev­enues than most peo­ple realise.”

” The higher para­noid schol­ar­ship is noth­ing if not coherent—in fact the para­noid mind is far more coher­ent than the real world. It is noth­ing if not schol­arly in tech­nique. McCarthy’s 96-​​page pam­phlet, McCarthy­ism, con­tains no less than 313 foot­note ref­er­ences, and Mr. Welch’s incred­i­ble assault on Eisen­hower, The Politi­cian, has one hun­dred pages of bib­li­og­ra­phy and notes. The entire right-​​wing move­ment of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, mono­graphs, foot­notes, and bib­li­ogra­phies. Some­times the right-​​wing striv­ing for schol­arly depth and an inclu­sive world view has star­tling con­se­quences: Mr. Welch, for exam­ple, has charged that the pop­u­lar­ity of Arnold Toynbee’s his­tor­i­cal work is the con­se­quence of a plot on the part of Fabi­ans, “Labour party bosses in Eng­land,” and var­i­ous mem­bers of the Anglo-​​American “lib­eral estab­lish­ment” to over­shadow the much more truth­ful and illu­mi­nat­ing work of Oswald Spengler.”