Rondam Ramblings

The Second City Network has made a wonderfully irreverent video answer to people who say that gay marriage is not "natural" . WAR...

I've not been blogging much because I'm working on a new startup which is taking up most of my time, but I could not let the legaliz...

UCSD scientists have demonstrated that you can create duplicate keys from photos of the keys taken up to 200 feet away.

Everyone needs to see this movie .

Ben Bernanke is surprised that the economy is not recovering faster: Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told reporters Wednesday that the central ba...

I've been a proponent of nuclear power. I'm still a proponent of nuclear power. But because I endorsed the view that there was not...

... if CO2 emissions ended up saving the environment instead of destroying it ?

Earlier today I raised an alarm over some discrepancies that I discovered between the behavior of the py-bcrypt library and the published ...

Isn't it funny how sometimes life seems to follow a theme? Here I am being all paranoid about security and not five minutes later I st...

[NOTE: See updates below and here .] I'm working on an application that requires a secure password hash. The state of the art is Colin ...

A year ago March I predicted that the Supreme Court would overturn Obamacare on Constitutional grounds. Today the LA Times reports : A top...

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is calling for big tax cuts . (My, what an innovative idea.) In order to offset any lost tax revenue — a...

... that we are in another bubble, this should dispel it. Groupon, a three-year-old company with zero profit, is filing for an IPO. Why do...

"The global war on drugs has 'failed'" according to a new report by ... The Global Commission on Drug Policy.

This is not a rhetorical question. Apparently, Spain has had people marching in the streets for the last two weeks. Who knew? Not me.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and go on the record as predicting that the world will not end tomorrow . (Actually, in some parts o...

Actually, "the Rich" Don't "Create Jobs," We Do .

The opening of the Morganza spillway for the first time since 1973 is at the top of the news . It's dramatic. A lot of people will lo...

They are just screwing people left and right .

If I can get enough people to click on this link I can win an iPad!

The intelligence that proved crucial to finding Bin Laden was not obtained through torture .

This is from Ezra Klein in The Washington Post : Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t....

Some pictures just speak for themselves.

The birthers have already found a new angle : A group of die-hard "birthers" took their conspiracy theory about President Obama...

One of the first things I thought to myself on hearing about the death of Bin Laden was: I wonder how Fox News and friends are going to spin...

David Sirota nails it: "This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory: He has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regret...

I am a "member" of a "group" called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength . The reason I put the words in scare qu...

The White House has "released" (you'll see why I put that word in scare quotes when you follow the link) the long form of his ...

John D. Cook writes: I’m skeptical when I hear someone say that he was able to program circles around his colleagues and it’s all because h...

My world, along with that of a zillion other geeks, came crashing down around me about 24 hours ago when Amazon Web Services went down and t...

During my morning read-through of the day's news I ran across this link pointing to a Washington Post article disclosing the existence ...

My sister pointed me to this video about a particularly interesting split-brain experiment . In these experiments, the corpus collosum , th...

Abortion is once again in the news because the anti-choice mafia is successfully taking over the state house. So this seems like as good a...

People are playing Quidditch . Or at least they're trying. They're adapting the game to conform to the laws of physics, but the r...

We've actually done this experiment once before back in the 90's. The Republicans screamed bloody murder. They were wrong then, a...

Tip o' the hat to the Douglass Boulevard Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky whose members have voted to support gay marriage. In ...

Just over a year ago (holy cow, has it been that long?) I was privileged to attend the premiere of a film made by a friend of mine named Hil...

I was a signatory to the original Patriotic Millionaires campaign back in November, and I recently signed on for round two . It's look...

I'm looking for a non-technical co-founder for a startup I'm working on. Main qualification is good interpersonal skills. Your pri...

So it seems that the Ramblings will continue. Thanks to everyone who responded to my last post. It was a real revelation to learn that the...

I've been writing Rondam Ramblings for nearly eight years now. It started out with no clear purpose, and now eight years on that's ...

The Ramblings have been quiet because I just got back from a week aboard the MS Allure of the Seas , the world's largest cruise liner. ...

In particular, it is vastly safer than coal pretty much any way you slice it. There's a particularly remarkable study linked to by th...

The Pioneer anomaly , one of the longest-standing mysteries in physics, has apparently been solved . It seems someone forgot to carry the o...

Fox News viewership is down 21% with Glenn Beck taking the biggest hit.

Think 2008 was bad? Paul B. Farrell says that was nothing compared with what lies in store if we don't start taxing the super-rich: Wa...

Newt is afraid of "a secular atheist country ... dominated by radical Islamists." Do Republicans stop to think at all about what ...

I've said before that Obama is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from George Bush in terms of his policies. Add two more data poi...

I believe in supporting quality independent journalism, so it's painful to watch the digital train wreck that is the New York Times pa...

The Marshall Islands have fired the first shot in what I predict will eventually become a global conflict: instead of sitting idly by and w...