Eastern Europe?

The Economist has some ideas about naming the various bits of Europe.  My favorite: “Solvent Europe”, which Estonia is part of...

The World She's A-Changing...

The newspaper business' traditional business model was a fairly simple one: you created a newspaper with content that people found compelling, and you sold advertising space in that newspaper to businesses who wanted to reach the people reading your newspaper.  In most cases, it didn't really matter if people actually bought your newspaper, as the revenue from advertising absolutely dwarfed the subscription revenue.  In fact, it was common for all the subscription revenue to go to third-party distribution services (e.g., the paperboy and his supply chain) and not to the newspaper at all.

The advent of online advertising (can you spell Google?) and the concurrent decline in newspaper readership has drastically changed all this.  Now comes word that in the first quarter of this year, the group of newspapers whose flagship is the New York Times has passed a significant milestone: they now make more money from subscriptions than they do from advertising.  This change is almost entirely due to declining advertising revenuel; subscription revenue (including online subscription revenue) has inched up but slightly.  This is the brave new business world the newspapers are trying – and largely failing – to navigate.  Much gnashing of teeth occurs amongst the progressivati over this.  Personally, I just take some satisfaction in the fact that the marketplace is working...

Awesome: Ferrofluids in Motion...

Reminder: the Seven Minutes of Curiousity...

This coming Sunday night is when Curiousity faces its seven minutes of terror as it lands on Mars.  I'll be staying up (very late for me!) to watch the coverage...

Mr. Watts is On a Roll!

Anthony Watts is a prominent anthropogenic global warming skeptic, and his web site Watts Up With That is a prime source of information for the larger community of skeptics.  Mr. Watts just released (on Sunday) a scientific study that brilliantly copies the style of another study just released on Saturday by a non-skeptic.  By using the same methods already widely accepted in the climate science community, Mr. Watts makes it impossible for them to simply dismiss his work as some amateur, funded-by-Koch “junk science”.  And indeed, Mr. Watts' study is already being widely reported in the lamestream media.  The climate community won't like his paper's results, though: he shows, very convincingly, that over half of the warming shown in the accepted studies comes from measurement error and not actual warming.  Once you remove the measurement error, the warming is solidly in the range of what's explainable by ordinary climatic variation.

Opinion polls have been showing a trend toward increasing skepticism of anthropogenic global warming amongst ordinary citizens worldwide.  In most countries the skeptics now outnumber the “believers” (though in most cases the “don't knows” outnumber skeptics and believers combined).  The wide press coverage of Mr. Watts' paper should help accelerate that trend – especially because it skewers one of the most often-cited foundations of the IPCC reports: the historical temperature records.  Nice work, Mr. Watts...

LBJ Orders Some Slacks...

Lyndon Baines Johnson (aka “LBJ”) was the U.S. president in the years I was a teenager (1963 - 1969).  In my memory he's closely associated with the rise of the welfare state, the Vietnam war, corrupt politics, and his use of the space program for publicity.  While it wasn't so obvious at the time, when our news was filtered by Democrat-friendly news media, history's hindsight has made it very clear that LBJ was a salty character.  Private recordings catch him using language I only learned once I joined the U.S. Navy, and amongst his intimates he was famous for his rough, “earthy” verbal manner.

Here's a recording of LBJ ordering some slacks from the Haggar company in Texas.  It's a great illustration of LBJ's natural manner, and nicely animated in the video: