Steven Levitt gave an interesting talk for TED about the economics of a crack-dealing gang [1]. He makes some interesting comparisons with the way that corporations work.
Top 10 strangest terrorism patents [2]. Items 1 and 4 have been implemented many years ago, item 5 was probably implemented by the CIA decades ago (they did many similar things), item 7 will probably kill a significant portion of the passengers (bummer if it goes off accidentally), item 8 has the same problem but will only target nervous people (calm terrorists can do what they want), and the creator of item 9 doesn’t seem to have much idea about how much energy is contained by high explosive.
Supporters of Barack Obama are adopting Hussein as their middle-name to support him and oppose some of the unreasonable claims from extremists [3]. I’m not planning to call myself Russell Hussein Coker.
Chris Samuel summarises the latest CSIRO report about droughts caused by climate change [4]. He notes that most simulations are based on lower levels of CO2 than we are expecting…
Interesting article in the Guardian about car use in the US [5]. It suggests that soon suburbs will be slums occupied by the poor an unemployed and inner city areas will experience a revival.
Recently I’ve been putting the papers I’ve presented at conferences online on my documents blog (see this link for the “papers” category) [6]. The papers are almost unchanged from when I published them, I fixed up some broken URLs and made some notes on relevant things that have happened since publication but made no essential changes to the text.
Linux.com article about Bonnie++ [7]. It’s well written and covers most of the features quite well. An unfortunate omission is the fact that if you want to run Bonnie++ from the root account you can specify “-u user” on the command-line to run the test as a different user, or you can use “-u root” if you REALLY want to run it as root.
A Linux.com article with the source code for a Perl script to create charts from Bonnie++ results [8]. I had always planned that other people would write programs like this, I’m glad to see someone finally publish the source to one!
- [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/29
- [2] http://www.neatorama.com/2008/06/27/top-10-strangest-anti-terrorism-patents/
- [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/us/politics/29hussein.html
- [4] http://www.csamuel.org/2008/07/06/csiro-bom-report-drought-exceptional-circumstances-not
- [5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/06/travelandtransport.usa?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
- [6] http://doc.coker.com.au/category/papers/
- [7] http://www.linux.com/feature/139742
- [8] http://www.linux.com/feature/139743
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