Month: March 2010

WaPo stats on healthcare voting in the US. Show (by eyeballing, anyway, & as pointed out by James of England) no correlation between voting patterns and either health industry donations or number of uninsured constituents.

This strikes me as pretty weird. Maybe an excuse to load the data into pandas and play round with it.

The EU parliament are something like the House of Lords — you don’t tend to pay them much attention, or really trust them, but every now and again they come through and Do The Right Thing when the rest of the Powers That Be are in thrall to some ridiculous lobbyist-enhanced monstrosity.

Last week is one of those cases: the European Parliament has passed a resolution thoroughly condemning the secrecy of the ACTA negotiation process, in terms that are, compared to the normal EU bureacratese, pretty fierce:

2. Expresses its concern over the lack of a transparent process in the conduct of the ACTA

negotiations, a state of affairs at odds with the letter and spirit of the TFEU; is deeply concerned

that no legal base was established before the start of the ACTA negotiations and that

parliamentary approval for the negotiating mandate was not sought;

Pasting this over from a friend’s facebook status — because I don’t have a good answer, but I’m sure that, collectively, you do:

why are there so many love/death/life is tragic/my puppy is cuter than yours songs, but no song about the human relationship to books? or two books getting really well together? or the awkward feeling before you start writing?

What songs have we forgotten about?

Rolling Stone still has an incredible collection of writers:

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier.