Caboose

Al sent this link to me this morning: Ben Tripp: Vote for Glitch. The article would be funny if it wasn’t so frightening.

There is a tiny little ray of hope in there, at least the Australians are trying to do things right with their electronic voting system.

The problem is that the British government is much more likely to follow the example of the Americans.

Mark Pilgrim (of dive into mark) has an interesting app that looks at your weblog and recommands other things you might want to read: Recommended Reading.

An interesting article on the sociology of schools: Why Nerds are Unpopular.

It’s a little bitter in parts, but worth reading.

dive into mark has an online version of those magnetic poetry kits you often see on fridge doors. It even works with Opera (v7 for Windows).

You can find it here, or using words from this site.

Let me know what you come up with.

The UK’s National Statistics website has published some of the results of the 2001 census. This includes figures for the number of people who claimed “Jedi” as their religion:“390,000 Jedis There Are”

Nice to see some evidence of a sense of humour within the Civil Service…

[via The Register]

Update 13:31 The Scottish census site is much less informative, looks like some results may appear online after March.

It’s quite old, but funny:What if Operating Systems Were Airlines?

It was linked from this Register article.

As my broadband(ish) internet access is provided by NTL I was disappointed to read that they’re trying to introduce a daily usage limit. Kind of missing the point of always-on access aren’t they?

Found an interesting article about American interference in Chilean politics in the 60s and 70s: The Price of Power.

Found this interesting article about American interference in Chile’s politics in the 60’s and 70’s: The Atlantic | Dec 1982 | The Price of Power | Hersh.

Stumbled across PushBack today, it’s pretty similar to lots of American extreme-libertarian sites.

On the other hand it has this marvellous article. I like the contrast between estimated numbers of deaths due to lighter cars and the “no positive evidence” of lives saved by a reduction in emissions.

The twisting of this report from considering the effects of changes in relative weights between cars and light trucks (SUVs, etc.) to being an endorsement of big heavy cars is especially interesting.

If you actually read the reports they’re much less black and white than PushBack’s interpretation of them. The final report listed “The Deadly Effects of Fuel Economy Standards” is hardly a fair and balanced review of the subject, coming from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.