That was one hell of a rant! You should have posted it to your memestream, but I'll post this to mine.

flynn23 wrote:
Hockey 'purists' can't stand the fact that 3 of the last 4 Cups have gone to 'non-traditional' markets and that the last 2 Cups have gone to Southern US teams is grating on the nerves of every Canuckuckle head north of Oshawa, ONT. Whatever they can do to drag down this franchise, they have been doing. From poor press and media coverage (except from people who actually look at y'know... stats!), poor officiating (Scott Nichol overreacts and gets 12 game suspension. Alex Ovechkin slews and spears Danny Briere, no call), shitty scheduling (65% of the games so far have been on the road), and just general disrespect - this team has gotten the SHAFT. If anything, I hope that all the crap that is going to get kicked up from this meme does nothing but inspire this team to go ALL THE WAY just to silence this bullshit once and for all. When it's clutch time boys... think of all of these idiots and put their hot air into the wheelhouse of your shot, because that will be the only thing that will win something even greater than the Cup. Respect.

Its good when your team is a pain in everyone's ass, isn't it?

RE: SI.com - Allan Muir: Winning not enough to save Predators - Monday January 15, 2007

flynn23 wrote:
I'd like to see this same graphic overlaid with the murder rate for each sector. "Military" casualties excluded of course. Just capita murder rate. I would expect to see an interesting corollary.

Thats an interesting question. Below I'll post Wikipedia's GDP graph on the left and their murder graph on the right. I'm not sure there is a correlation. One suspects that poorer countries simply aren't able to collect good statistics. There seems to be a relationship between poverty and murders on these charts, but the obvious exception is the United States.

RE: The Big Picture | How big IS the US anyway?

After years of smart drafting, shrewd trades and clever free-agent signings, your team is in contention for the Cup.

Alas, it's hard to believe the club might be pricing the cost of moving vans in the near future.

The team is struggling desperately at the gate, ranking 23rd in the league. Despite all the winning, attendance is dwindling -- making it likely the Preds will miss the average marks necessary to qualify for revenue sharing from the league. And that's money they can't do without.

It should be made clear that the issue at hand isn't fan support. The die-hards at the Gaylord Entertainment Complex are as passionate and loyal as you'll find in the league. It's the empty seats that splatter the high-dollar lower bowl, and the rows of unoccupied luxury boxes that are the real problem.

The upper crust of Nashville's business community doesn't care about Hockey. I've heard that the impact of regulations on marketing in the healthcare industry might be part of the problem, but I also have to wonder how many Nashville businesses have sunk insane amount of money into seat licenses for the Titans. My employer used to have a half box in Atlanta for hockey/basketball. You could call up the secretary and get tickets. It was a nice perk working there. Unfortunately, they don't do it anymore...

SI.com - Allan Muir: Winning not enough to save Predators - Monday January 15, 2007

"The Destroying Old Woodsy Owl Costumes Guidelines" at www.symbols.gov are grim and final. The fact that they are displayed alongside a photo of a blissfully innocent old-school Woodsy frolicking in a meadow is especially disturbing.

BoingBoing's coverage of the demise of Woodsy Owl is hillarious.

Boing Boing: Government guide to destroying old Woodsy Owl costumes

We pro-regulators were making an assumption that history has shown to be completely false: That something as complex as an OS has to be built by a commercial entity. Only crazies imagined that volunteers outside the control of a corporation could successfully create a system over which no one had exclusive command. We knew those crazies. They worked on something called Linux.

I think about this mistake whenever I think about the current Microsoft-like network-neutrality debate – whether network owners can pick the stuff that flows across "their" network.

Wired 15.01: Lessig on his mistake

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.
When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in which he lives is stifling creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter that serves as a guide through a surreal alternate world. Stephenson will adapt his novel for the miniseries, the first time the Hugo and Nebula award winner has written for TV.

This is either going to be really great or really aweful. There is no middle ground with stuff like this.

SCI FI Wire | Diamond Age going to TV

10. Managers at Anti-Terrorism agencies sometimes accidentally leave the firewall open.
9. Former terrorist masterminds are cool as long as they agree to talk politics.
8. The President is likely to beleive anything a terrorist underling promises him during a crisis.
7. You should kill any Indians who live in your neighborhood with your bare hands because they might be terrorists.
6. CTU watches Fox news on every available TV because its the best source for raw, balanced information.
5. Lawyers nittering about civil liberties are just getting in the way.
4. Detention camps work!
3. Los Angeles has ticket collectors on the subway.
2. Jack Bauer tearing off a man's jugular with his teeth is the new black.
1. Cloe is dating Rush Limbaugh!

Some really nice infoporn over at The Big Picture right now. The linked chart compares the assets of various nations organized into geopolitical buckets. (The embedded image comes from wikipedia's GDP page, as the chart I'm referencing here is protected against embedding.)

Notice that Asia, for all its mindshare, is still relatively tiny, and the U.S., despite her plethora of self-inflicted woes, remains globally dominant.

In other words, America can screw up an aweful lot for a long time before international competitors are really a threat to her economic position. (Although a commenter in the thread observes that U.S. asset prices may be unfairly high due to foreign currencies being pegged to the dollar.) Also worth a look is this chart which vaugely compares the GDP of various nations with various U.S. States. I'm sure you're heard before that California has roughly the GDP of France (and half the population) but I didn't know that Texas has a comparable GDP to Canada. And Georgia, oh Georgia, if only your ski slopes were as nice as your GDP...

Its worth comparing top lists for GDP between 1995 and 2005. There have been some significant changes. For example, Canada appears to be falling behind in international terms, although I don't know if that is due to failings on her part, or simply that far more populous countries are starting to get their acts together. Brazil is rocketing up, but they have 6 times the population of Canada. Canada's population is comparable to California, but it is spread out over a far wider area, which probably makes it less efficient. (I also think that weather plays a role. Snow plows cost money.)

As various countries begin to figure out how to operate effective economies and stable politics you'd think that these charts would normalize toward a reflection of population differences, with some effects due to geographic constraints such as those I mentioned for Canada. Of course, I'm describing a vision for world peace. I think we're a long way off, but it appears progress is being made.

A longer term investment in ETFs targetting countries that have moved significantly between 1995 and 2005 might be a very sound idea if coupled with a reasonable understanding of and monitoring of the political and economic stability of the countries in question. Of course, I'm not an economist, so take that with a grain of salt.

The Big Picture | How big IS the US anyway?

A Google spokesman said the information could be used for "good and bad."

Open satellite imagery databases come full circle.

Telegraph | News | Terrorists 'use Google maps to hit UK troops'

In honor of MLK day and to take the edge of the last post, here is a video of the "I have a dream speech."

YouTube - Martin Luther King Jr - I have a dream speech - Aug 28 1963