Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy -- almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall.

Canada troops battle 10-foot Afghan marijuana plants - CNN.com

Why isn't MemeStreams stickier? What will it take to get every registered user to visit the site daily and generate 20 page views? There ought to be a plan!

* Communication Function: MySpace replaces email; Memestream messaging does not.
* Demographics: Memestreams users, on average, seem to have lives and professions.
* Content: I read the RSS feed... through livejournal... with the exception of the links I follow through, most of my reading is likely untrackable. If I couldn't, I would read Memestreams less.
* Content navigation: Banging on the folksonomy drum again -- I read the front page. I read my recommendation page. But outside the cover articles, I have little inclination to "dive deeper". Except when entries link to other entries, or when I remember an article that I wish to recall, I don't go through the bulk of the site. If there were tags or other automatically generated clustering content links, I probably would.

RE: Panic on 43rd Street | Vanity Fair

In this hilarious send-up of Lovecraftian horror and steampunk adventure, President Abraham Lincoln's top spy is a bodyless head known only as Screw-On Head.

Excellent pilot.

SCIFI.COM | The Amazing Screw-On Head

I spent some time fantasizing about writing an article, possibly for The Escapist called "The Non-Booth Babes of E3". Interview people like Kathy Schoback and Elonka Dunin and Terri Perkins who have real and important roles in the industry, photograph them at their companies' booths, make the point that it is possible to be female and more than a smile and a pair of tits and have a role in the game industry. How many women are deterred from working in the industry because of its objectification of women, both in its products and at its trade shows?

Games * Design * Art * Culture

After five years of serving Pittsburgh as their state-of-the-art sporting facility, PNC Park, the home of the rundown, poorly maintained Pirates, said Tuesday it is threatening to leave Pittsburgh unless a new team can be built within the next three years.

PNC Park Threatens To Leave Pittsburgh Unless Better Team Is Built | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

# The first rule of Maintenance is - you do not talk about Maintenance.
# The second rule of Maintenance is - you DO NOT talk about Maintenance.

Be right back...

The Gulf Stream indeed contributes to Europe's warmth, but it is wrong to conflate the climate difference across the North Atlantic with the northward flow of warm water in the Gulf Stream. This erroneous logic leads to such statements as (from The Times of London): "The British Isles lie on the same latitude as Labrador on the East Coast of Canada, and are protected from a similarly icy climate by the Atlantic conveyor belt." Such claims are absolutely wrong.

American Scientist Online - The Source of Europe's Mild Climate

I have mentioned that the Fed has actually targeted volatility, desiring to reduce it so that investors take more risk. Remember, taking risk is inflationary while avoiding it is deflationary. A prime example of the Fed doing this is ARMs. Remember when Greenspan pointed out to home-owners how much money they were giving away in interest by holding fixed mortgages instead of flipping into adjustable rate mortgages? Why was this done?

When a home-owner holds a fixed mortgage, they hold an option, a very valuable one. At any time they can refinance when rates go lower (for a fee). This option makes them long volatility, a position home-owners have held for decades. Lenders are short this option. We have explained this in detail when talking about Fannie Mae (FNM): when prepayments occur because of refinancing, FNM must rebalance their duration and buy bonds as they are rising in price (yield falling). The more rates move around the more FNM (or any lender holding a mortgage as an asset), the more FNM must adjust; each time they do it is a cost.

When home-owners en mass flipped into ARMs, they became sellers of volatility (they gave up this option) and lenders became long volatility (exchanged convexity risk for default risk). The absolutely massive amounts of ARMs significantly reduced volatility in the bond market, which transferred into all markets.

The Fed used the home-owner to reduce volatility. VAR went down and investors took more risk.

Minyanville - VAR

Up until last week, I thought that the notion of automated unit tests was relatively new; introduced in the last five to ten years by the agile/XP crowd. Boy was I wrong. Once again I find that whenever I find a "new" technique in software development that is a boon to productivity and/or quality, there's a good chance that Parnas/Dijkstra/Brooks wrote about it - in detail - before I was born.
...
What is hard is living it in your day-to-day development, when you're under the gun to deliver new function and declare bugs fixed. This is where culture comes in. If the culture says that you're not done until your code is Java doc'd and unit tests are written, then code will get Java doc'd and unit tests will get written. If your culture says that you're done when your software simply appears to work, over time your software, your team, your customers, and your partners will all suffer the consequences.

IBM developerWorks : Blogs : building tools to support software development teams

A basic idea in iterative development is that at regular (preferably short) intervals, you produce a working system with some subset of the final features of the planned release. A trick to make this more real and more tangible to developers is to find some venue where you can demo your new version of the software at the end of the interval. The rules are simple - demonstrate an interesting set of scenarios that cut across the system and fake as little as possible. The requirement to produce working code by a hard deadline is a powerful motivating factor that helps drive issues to closure by starkly constraining the 'time' leg of the resource triangle. Also, if your iteration's work isn't in the demo, it feels like you didn't really deliver anything, which is a very bad feeling in a culture where the ultimate measure of success is delivering working, high-quality software.

This is one of the nice features from Scrum that we use.

IBM developerWorks : Blogs : building tools to support software development teams