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A number of people seemed to enjoy the word puzzle I posted earlier today. I therefore post for your amusement 4 other words to be trimmed down to nothing letter by letter — same rules as the original post. Faithful reader Katja deserves credit for the first three. To solve each of hers I had [...]
Archive for November, 2011
November 30th, 2011
Category: Urbanism, Watching Conservatives
Jason Epstein’s Introduction to the recently-published 50th Anniversary edition of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities makes this powerful intellectual connection: Death and Life … [is] about the dynamics of civilization, how vital economies and their societies are formed, elaborated, and sustained, and the forces that thwart and ruin them…Her sympathies are with the [...]
November 30th, 2011
Category: Language and usage
In case you have a few minutes to kill over your lunch break today, here is a fun word game. Take a word and knock one letter off at a time until you have no letters left. However, after the removal of each letter, what remains, without re-arrangement of letters, has to be a word. [...]
November 29th, 2011
This past Sunday, I flew home to Los Angeles from Thanksgiving with my relatives in Montreal (actually, it was a bat mitzvah since Canadian Thanksgiving occurred six weeks ago but you get the idea). The Sunday after Thanksgiving is the busiest flying day of the year, with millions of passengers criss-crossing the country. And I [...]
November 29th, 2011
ARM´s 25 billion general-purpose computer cores are like mitochondria in cells.
November 29th, 2011
Jamie Malanowski is no doubt correct that the release of the new Meryl Streep Film “The Iron Lady” will cause many people to revisit what they consider Margaret Thatcher’s most memorable moments. Not wanting in this case to buck the tide, here is my selection, showing Palin’s surprising influence on the Prime Minister. That would [...]
November 29th, 2011
The faculty senate meeting passed all four resolutions en bloc about 10:1, 336-34. The resolutions are here, here, here, and here. This morning, specific language of no confidence in the administration was removed from one of the resolutions by its sponsors so it wouldn’t appear to be a demand for resignation. I think the attendance, [...]
November 28th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Harold linked to a very scary article. I was shocked that the work conditions at an Amazon warehouse could be that nasty. Perhaps Amazon wants to make sure that global warming doesn’t take place by having a minimal air conditioning bill? Now, could a boycott of an international firm succeed? I don’t think so. If [...]
November 28th, 2011
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Economics
Between September, 2010 and September 2011, I spent $1,042 buying books from Amazon.com. Since October, I have spent $0 there. As I describe today in the Nation online, I stopped clicking on Amazon after reading this terrific story by Spencer Soper describing Amazon’s poor labor practices at a facility near Allentown Pennsylvania. Incidentally, I encountered [...]
November 28th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Economics
I recently presented a series of DIY calculations for determining the size of the U.S. marijuana market. This post got a lot of play around the web, most notably from Andrew Sullivan, who again did me the kindness of adding his millions of regular readers to my regular readers (both of them). A number of [...]