One space or two?

Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

Attacking the Minnesota Winter Death Star

How every football game should be broadcast

Why Not Regulate Guns as Seriously as Toys?

Jared Loughner was considered too mentally unstable to attend community college. He was rejected by the Army. Yet buy a Glock handgun and a 33-round magazine? No problem.

To protect the public, we regulate cars and toys, medicines and mutual funds. So, simply as a public health matter, shouldn’t we take steps to reduce the toll from our domestic arms industry? 

Read more...

The Oatmeal: How to Make Your (Online) Shopping Cart Suck Less

Click through to read the whole comic:

How many foreclosures were illegal? FL Attorney General says A LOT

Florida Attorney General Fraudclosure Report | Unfair, Deceptive and Unconscionable Acts in Foreclosure Cases

Honoring the Constitution - the origin of big government

An incredibly insightful piece from political writer Eric Black this week, noting the irony in the House Republican reading of the Constitution last week:

Those who framed the Constitution and favored its ratification believed that the United States needed a strong federal government. That’s why they are referred to the “federalists.”

Oh history, thou art funny.

Unemployment: How to use charts to provide context

Curb Your Enthusiasm - NYTimes.com

Gov. Pawlenty's budget legacy

A nice overview of the end to the one-time budget fixes for Minnesota, now that former Gov. Pawlenty has spent them all. 

The last Congress did a lot

• Health care reform
• Financial reform
• Food safety
• Nuclear arms treaty
• Multiple economic stimulus packages
• and more...

It wasn't perfect, but that's one heck of a list

Placebo effect may make sugar pills beat "real" drugs

Science writer Steve Silberman has written a terrific background article on the “little bombshell of a study” on placebos that was published right before Christmas in the open-access medical journal PLoS One.

The study, writes Silberman, “threatens to make humble sugar pills something they’ve rarely had a chance to be in the history of medicine: a respectable, ethically sound treatment for disease that has been vetted in controlled trials.”

Read more at Minnpost.com

A little British phone humor

Hat tip to muninetworks.org.

8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study | Wired Science | Wired.com

8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study | Wired Science | Wired.com: "A group of British schoolchildren may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. In a new paper in Biology Letters, 25 8- to 10-year-old children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns."

No one is too young for science and science is fun. To quote the kid: "We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before." This is absolutely brilliant and should be part of every school curriculum.

Ban on Cribs with Drop-sides Seems Like Overreach

In the last decade, 32 infants have died in cribs with sides that can lower down, called drop-side cribs.  Because of this, and a bounty of recalls (over 7 million cribs), the U.S. government is going to essentially ban the sale of drop-side cribs. 

I agree that we have a problem when manufacturers have to recall so many cribs.  But there are approximately 8 million children who are age 0-2 and in the last decade there have been over 40 million kids in the last decade who have been ages 0-2.  That means 1 in every 1.25 million infants has died in a drop-side crib in the last 10 years.  For comparison, 2,500 infants die of SIDS each year (1 in every 1,600 infants).  And 40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents (1 in every 7,500 people).


It's a tragedy when a child dies, but enough of a tragedy to ban every drop-side crib?  I'd be more confident if we knew that cribs with fixed sides will be manufactured with more care for safety than drop-side cribs, but I doubt it (it would be interesting to know how many infants died in non-drop-side cribs in the last decade).

There are many hazards for infants, but I can think of a few (persistent endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA) that probably deserve more attention than drop-side cribs.

TSA's misdirected anti-terror efforts: a "nude awakening"

There's probably no better summary of my feelings about the latest techno-mythical anti-terror device at airports.  From a college junior, no less:

The odds of dying on an airplane as a result of a terrorist hijacking are less than 1 in 25 million — which, for all intents and purposes, is effectively zero — according to Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. By comparison, the odds of dying in a normal airplane crash, according to the OAG Aviation Database, are 1 in 9.2 million. This means that, on average, pilots are responsible for more deaths than terrorists.

In the same vein, the average American is 87 times more likely to drown than die by a terrorist attack; 50 times more likely to die by lightening; and 8 times more likely to die by a police officer, according to the National Safety Council’s 2004 estimates. I can go on, the point is this: the risk of a terrorist attack is so infinitesimal and its impact so relatively insignificant that it doesn’t make rational sense to accept the suspension of liberty for the sake of avoiding a statistical anomaly.

To cut all taxes or not?

Paul Krugman says of extending all the Bush tax cuts (including those for the wealthy) "Let's Not Make a Deal."

But Nick Silver suggests that Democrats don't necessarily have any bargaining chips, unless they're seriously prepared to let the entire $4 trillion tax cut program expire.

My vote?  Let the cuts expire and see if Republicans are willing to start fresh with tax cuts in January when they have to argue about the deficit impact.  Or just pass an entirely new program of Obama middle-class tax cuts.  Let the Republicans oppose that.

Hard to understand opposition to food safety

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Food, the Bad and the Ugly
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This Election Celebrated Multiculturalism

From my Uncle's brilliant Christmas letter:

And – this may surprise some of you – I'm pretty darn grateful for the elections just past, not for policy reasons (considering, if you will, how well the GOP did the last time it controlled the House) but because it's pretty darn cool that, having elected a black man President, we now have a Speaker who is, well, kind of an orange color, which I think speaks well for the inclusive impulses of the American electorate.

Buy organic strawberries

California sacrifices farm workers in favor of strawberries | Grist: "Strawberry pickerAfter a long battle, the state of California has overruled its own scientists and approved the use of the powerful neurotoxic pesticide methyl iodide on strawberries as a replacement for the ozone-depleting pesticide methyl bromide. Grist has covered the issue extensively, but it was Sam Fromartz, author of Organic, Inc, who brought up the crucial point:"

Pollution Makes Gays - Support the Environmental Protection!

Pollution Making 'Male Birds Mate With Each Other': Scientists : TreeHugger

P.S. subject is very, very tongue in cheek