National park wardens to get arms in 2009

I also hear they’ll be given hands by 2012.

The story is interesting, but the real gold is in the Fark headline:

China surpasses the US as the world’s top carbon producer, making the problem real to conservatives and no longer interesting to liberals

Elmo, as in the Muppet.

Elmo is the only Muppet ever to testify before the U.S. Congress. At the request and with the assistance of Rep. Duke Cunningham, he testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education in April 2002, urging support for increased funding in music education.

I guess Cheney’s hand up Bush’s ass doesn’t qualify.

Indexed is a pretty self-explanatory blog, once you see it.

I like this one in particular, which Jessica Hagy did custom for Freakonomics Blog:

I once worked in a bank, making loans to small business start-ups. Our rule of thumb was that 90% of new businesses fail. The exceptions were franchisees and pizza places. But we saw no shortage of people willing to mortgage their homes to start their own sporting good stores and boutique dress shops, despite the 90% chance of failure. Without clueless optimists, the economy would grind to a halt. My own career has been a long string of failures and a few notable successes.

I understand the math of capitalism, and how the few successes are so large they pay for all the failures and then some. But at any given moment, the majority of resources in a capitalist system are being pushed over a cliff by morons. This fascinates me. And it’s clearly the reason that humans rule the earth. We found a system to harness the power of stupid.

From The Dilbert Blog

Craig: [chortles]
Laura: “Whatcha laughing at?”
Craig: “A very technical joke”
Laura: [disappointed] “Awwwww.” (after a few of these, she now knows better than to ask)
Craig: [chortles some more]
Laura: [feeling left out] “Then stop laughing!”
Laura: [reads the joke]
Laura: “…forget it” [shakes head]

The key to successfully predicting the future is knowing when to stop.

I propose that things that are paid will become free and vice versa. So music and books and other media are turning from paid products to free marketing, while free-to-air video and radio become a subscription or on-demand product for a fee. If I explain any more the premise will fall apart, so I’ll stop here. It is now A Law. Obey.

From The Anderson Switch on The Long Tail.

Joel Spolsky is easily one of my favorite bloggers. He’s a software developer / manager of a software development company that he grew himself. On top of being a very insightful guy, he’s a great writer: he tells stories and comes up with all sorts of quips and analogies. Here’s an example from his latest post:

Near as I can tell, Chandler’s original vision was pretty much just to be “revolutionary.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t code “revolutionary.” I need more details to write code. Whenever the spec describes the product in terms of adjectives (“it will be extremely cool”) rather than specifics (“it will have brushed-aluminum title bars and all the icons will be reflected a little bit, as if placed on a grand piano”) you know you’re in trouble.

If you have anything to do with software development, you need to be reading Joel. If you have anything to do with business or customers or users, you should probably be reading him too. And if you like to know about how people and the world really works, reading him wouldn’t be a bad idea.