Just 8 Republicans voted Aye, and 44 Democrats voted Noe. The mapping onto House members’ ideal points is pretty tight, but not perfect. Check out this graph.

I picked a bad day to be here on the West side of LA. Lots of choppers in the air over UCLA right now. Time to get out of Dodge.

It isn’t every day you came across this juxtaposition, let alone in the New York Times

The phrase appears in a lovely article on echidnas by Natalie Angier…

It is a rare day that I find myself even partially agreeing with Miranda Devine. But her take on The Chaser’s recent efforts makes a good point.

Take the pranks in an American diner and hardware store in last week’s show, or this week’s skit tricking Americans into eating hay.

Americans are easy targets, not because they are stupid or gullible, but because they are polite and tolerant of eccentricity. Living in a large melting pot, they are used to encountering people with habits, behaviours and values different from their own, so are more accepting of bizarre antics that would raise the ire of a less diverse culture. This is one of America’s greatest qualities, and those who sneer at it are exposing their own lack of sophistication.

I’d add that an American who has stopped to be part of a sidewalk info-merical (the ruse used by the Chaser crew, I presume) understand their role, and will be compliant to a fault. And on this score I think you’d get similar results if you tried the same stunt in Sydney.

This screencast costs USD9.00, but promises to be useful (I found it via Gruber’s Daring Fireball).

This is the kind of thing that some of our grad students could use. Knowledge of a *nix command line is a real dividing line, imho, since it maps pretty cleanly onto who can code, and who can’t.

/Users/jackman[44] find . -name '*.[rR]' -exec grep -l pscl {} \;

um, or else…

Does Intrade have a betting line going on this? How many negative votes will Sotomayor get in her Senate confirmation vote?

Any guesses?