Munah Munah

YouTube - Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four

Check this out: YouTube - Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four -- this is one of the neatest visualization of statistics I've seen in a very long time.

The Minecraft Experiment

I recently started playing Minecraft (and mistakenly hooked my sons on it too-Doh!) and I've been following the community off and on as it goes. I read The Minecraft experiment, day 9 and completely laughed myself to tears.

Read the whole series if you like this one. It's a riot.

And on that note...

John Carmack of id Software fame has now chimed in with his two cents on our current model of government. Here's a quote:

It is unfortunate that income taxes get deducted automatically from most people’s paychecks, before they ever see the money they earned. A large chunk of the population thinks that tax day is when you get a nice little refund check. Good trick, that. If everyone was required to pay taxes like they pay their utilities, attitudes would probably change. When you get an appallingly high utility bill, you start thinking about turning off some lights and changing the thermostat. When your taxes are higher than all your other bills put together, what do you do? You can make a bit of a difference by living in Texas instead of California, but you don’t have many options regarding the bulk of it.

Also, it is horribly crass to say it, but taxes are extracted by the threat of force. I know a man (Walt Anderson), who has been in jail for a decade because the IRS disagreed with how his foundations were set up, so it isn’t an academic statement. What things do you care strongly enough about to feel morally justified in pointing a gun at me to get me to pay for them? A few layers of distance by proxy let most people avoid thinking about it, but that is really what it boils down to. Feeding starving children? The justice system? Chemotherapy for the elderly? Viagra for the indigent? Corn subsidies?

Articles & Essays by Orson Scott Card - Afterword to the novel Empire

I believe everyone in the United States should read Articles & Essays by Orson Scott Card - Afterword to the novel Empire, just as a reminder of how insane politics have become nowadays.

The more I read, and the more research I do on the upcoming elections, the more I start to think that no matter who I choose to represent me at whatever level of govenment, I will have made a fatal mistake in judgement.

Sadness

While waiting for coverage of the Soyuz TMA-18 reentry to continue, NASA ran footage of the final roll out of shuttle Discovery. The whole thing was very sad.

There's something amazingly painful about watching the end of the NASA human spaceflight program, and more than likely the end of American astronauts in space.

Hopefully, Russia and China can keep the dreams of a human future in space alive.

Color Survey Results « xkcd

xkcd recently posted a color survey, and today he finally posted the results.

Apparently, I'm thankful I didn't take this, because the results are just insanely hilarious.