Pushing my passion for the sufficiently obscure, I now own three-legged pig chinese good luck. Now if I only owned more balloons.
three-legged pig chinese good luck
My new favorite search string: Four users in January have arrived at Inkstain after searching on three-legged pig chinese good luck. Also problems in France, a search on which I inexplicably show up on the first Google page.
The Golden Rake
Tim Lambert awards the inestimable Michael Fumento the Golden Rake.
It is named in honor of Sideshow Bob, who in the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons, steps on a rake whacking himself in the face. Then he does it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
Fumento, remarkably, has posted yet another witty riposte on his I Am Not A Blogger Web Site for what must be close to the ninth time, umm, erring in his description of last year’s study in the Lancet on deaths in Iraq.
Here are the latest words from Michael “I Know So Much about the Study, I Don’t Have to Read It” Fumento:
Moreover, the authors of the Lancet article CLAIMED to have re-calculated the number of deaths after excluding those in Fallujah, except that strangely enough they never bothered to say what those numbers were.
Thwack!
Just a reminder (and herein lies the rake – this language has been pointed out to Fumento too many times to count) here is what the study’s authors actually said:
We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000-194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included. (emphasis added)
Things that really suck
In 1862 and ’63, Peruvian slave merchants kidnapped some 1,500 people from Easter Island – half the people left after their society collapsed. They were sold into Peru’s guano mines. Most died.
There was an international outcry, and the Peruvians were shamed into returning the small number of surviving Easter Islanders to their home. They brought smallpox back with them.
The Insurance Industry and Climate Change
In the past, I’ve taken the insurance industry’s recognition of the economic threat of greenhouse climate change as a sort of free market signal. My reasoning was that people who actually have an economic stake view the threat as real.
But in a couple of posts recently, Roger Pielke Jr. has argued that the insurance industry essentially has an economic motive to inflate the perception of risk:
It seems like pointing out the obvious that the reinsurance industry has a powerful vested interest in charging the highest rates that the market will bear for its products. And the prospect of more disasters means a basis for charging higher rates. Thus, for the moment setting aside whether or not recent disasters are caused by climate change, it seems pretty clear that when the reinsurance industry say that disasters will get worse in the future, they have a clear conflict in interest.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On Writing
Luis links to Joel Spolsky’s college advice, which includes a nugget likely of value for those beyond the confines of the computer science world Spolsky means to address. In short – if you can write well, which is really just to say communicate well, you’ll end up big cheese:
Would Linux have succeeded if Linus Torvalds hadn’t evangelized it? As brilliant a hacker as he is, it was Linus’s ability to convey his ideas in written English via email and mailing lists that made Linux attract a worldwide brigade of volunteers.
Pielke and Sarewitz on Disaster’s Toll and Implications
Roger Pielke Jr. and Daniel Sarewitz argue in TNR that the way to reduce the damage from things like climate change and tsunamis is to, in essence, help people be less poor:
Disparities in disaster vulnerability between rich and poor will continue to grow. About 97 percent of population growth is occurring in the developing world. This growth, in turn, drives urbanization and coastal migration. The result is that, in the next two decades, the population of urban areas in the developing world will likely increase by two billion people. And this population is being added to cities that are mostly located on coastal or flood plains–or in earthquake zones–and are unable to provide the quality of housing, services, infrastructure, and environmental protection that can help reduce vulnerability.
Collapse of the Maya
Skipping around last night through the ubiquitous Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse(1), I found some good discussion about something I’ve been trying to understand better: the climatological component of the collapse of the Maya. What I’ve been wondering is the extent to which they’re a case study similar to the Anasazi.
(click through for more)
Continue reading ‘Collapse of the Maya’ »
All Your Bike Rides Are Belong to Us
Somebody set up us up the bomb. Really.
For our New Year’s Day ride, we headed up Tijeras Canyon and into the Manzano Mountains up South 14. Until we had to stop, because there was a bomb in the road.
We were stopped by the ranger station at the foot of the hill when a pickup slowed and rolled down his window to say that the bomb squad had the road blocked off halfway up the hill. His purpose was to do us a favor, so we wouldn’t waste our time riding that way. But the whole point of our bike rides is miles, time in the saddle, and amusement. What could be better. A bomb!
South 14 is a big wide-shouldered highway that climbs a relatively gentle grade up through piñon woods, through road cuts of a lovely tawny limestone. It was busy enough that two more helpful drivers stopped to tell us that the road was closed ahead.
When we got to the scene of the crime, there was a county sheriff blocking the road, turning all the drivers back, and the Albuquerque Police Department bomb squad doing whatever bomb squads do. This, wisely, seems to involve a great deal of patience and very slow movement.
The story we pieced together from the cops and the TV news guy on the scene involved a 250-pound military surplus bomb, with intact detonator (x-rays were somehow involved in determining this bit), chained to a stop sign and wrapped in an American flag with anti-Bush slogans scrawled on it.
Somebody set up us the bomb good.