http://www.cnn.com&story=breaking_news@3639030506/ALLPOLITICS/03/26/flat.tax/index.html
Sure looks like a CNN site. But how can this be true??? You click through to look at the 1040FT form at irs.gov:
http://www.irs.gov&table=8719810@3639030506/news/new/f1040ft.pdf
and it looks pretty good at first glance too. Until you get down to the bottom.... Yep, it's all a trick. I hadn't known this, but the '@' in a URL ignores everything before the '@' and starts processing from there.
As of 1:30PM here, searching on "flat tax" at the IRS site reveals nothing, and neither they nor CNN are posting anything about this being a fake. I'm surprised - they look like very good fakes to me, and I bet some people will be fooled... [Many thanks to KC for the timely link!]
Wow!: Go to MSN's Search Engine, search on "anything interesting", and I'm the SECOND link given.
Are you done yet???: I can't really explain why, but the Britney Spears Pepsi ad they kept playing during the Oscars last night really irritated me. When did her signature move become ripping her clothes off? What was Bob Dole thinking?!?!?! And I forgot to link to this attention getting PETA ad a couple of weeks ago: [WARNING: kitty sex]
Alien chasing is a "shirt required" activity, folks: This poster is representative of what went wrong with the X Files....
Why go to the theater when we have movies?: Patrick Stewart offers a compelling answer to this question. He talks about the contract between an actor and the audience in live theater, and how this enhances the experience of the performance. [via Windowseat]
You might imagine that if you were to walk around the campus of a place like the University of Michigan you would be continually running into guys with twenty-inch necks on their way to football practice, while if you were to walk around the campus of a small liberal-arts college like Williams you would be running into tweedy ectomorphs on their way to French class. In fact, in 1997-98 (the most recent year for which complete enrollment data are available) there were six hundred and sixty-six varsity athletes enrolled at the University of Michigan and seven hundred and fifteen enrolled at Williams - and Michigan is more than ten times as big. Thirty-six percent of Williams students play intercollegiate sports and only three percent of Michigan's do. Princeton has nine hundred and forty-two athletes, half again as many as Michigan.
and then:
In 1951, the Princeton squash player was an academically qualified man who happened to enjoy competitive squash. He was a sports "walk-on": he simply showed up for tryouts one day and made the team. Now there are almost no varsity-sports walk-ons at the colleges in the Mellon database. Athletes are recruited out of high school. Even squash players are identified during the admissions process as people qualified to play intercollegiate squash. There are many striking tables in "The Game of Life," but the most revealing are two that show the admissions advantage enjoyed in 1999 by different groups of applicants at an unnamed college in the database which does not offer athletic scholarships (meaning that it cannot require potential athletes to play a sport after they enter) and where coaches do not have the final word in admissions. Among men, if you were black you had an eighteen-per-cent better chance of getting into this college than a white student with the same S.A.T. scores had. If you were what is known in admissions talk as a "legacy"-that is, the child of an alumnus-you had a twenty-five-per-cent better chance. But if you were an athlete you had a forty-eight-percent better chance. If you were a female athlete, your advantage was fifty-three per cent.
The book seems to indicate that arguments that athletics just enhance one's college experience are off. They show that athletes have a different relationship to their school and classmates. One can still claim that athletics has value on its own, separate and different from academic pursuits, but the evidence they show, if accurate, is a strong argument that current college athletics programs are at odds with making academics the first priority at colleges and universities.
On a humorous side note, with regards to the authors, who are statisticians, the review says:
They are the sort of people who think that no observation is so
intuitive that it can't be improved by a regression analysis.
Hee hee! [via Rebecca's Pocket]
Meow!: Everything you ever wanted to know about Getting a Cat Out of a Tree. No, seriously. It's must-read material for anyone who has a cat they let outside. Gives alternatives to feeling clichéd and calling the fire department when kitty gets stuck. In fact, fire departments discourage such calls. Better bet is to call a tree service, which makes sense when you think about it. [via Strange Brew]
Green Thumb
Can things get weirder?: Cardhouses's Pixbarn is a very fun browse of various odd packaging, advertising, and other stuff, like this flier about a home fallout shelter snackbar or this bizarre image from a WWII era pamphlet. Oh, and I had these pencils! I loved them. I think they're still at my parents' house somewhere. [via PCJM]
Scratch the "from scratch": The Cake Mix Doctor is dedicated to getting the most out of your cake mix. From easy-to-add ingredients to tricks to change the texture of the cake, cakes from mix won't have to be boring anymore. [via PCJM]
Like the "I Want to Buy the World a Coke" campaign?: I was glad to see Mir came down without event, and some of the media coverage about it was very poignant. The people who wanted to watch the crash-down close up were idiots. And Taco Bell was just tasteless (their promotion, not their food....)
Won't be watching See Spot Run either...: The Hissyfit movie "reviews", "Reviews of a Movie We Haven't Seen", besides being funny, become fairly close to my current movie opinions, what with the current crop of films out that I have no intention of watching either. Their latest review, of Say It Isn't So!, is representative and worth checking out.
So, I stayed tuned in, hoping for the answers. I should have known there wouldn't be any. This was FOX, and they did have the X-Files' Director Skinner narrating the show. The NASA representative never said anything substantive, but we never saw what questions he was asked. And as soon as the show started sinking to claiming the government murdered a dozen astronauts to cover this all up (including hitting one of them with a train, which seems like a unnecessarily tricky murder method), they were clearly going for sensation, not truth. Television is clearly not a reliable medium for intellectual debate.
Fortunately, the web is (*grin*). Introducing Moon Hoax, a site that debunks people claiming we never went to the moon, and does a good job of it - not overly technical, but with links to official NASA content where it's helpful, and a humorous tone. AND, it has a special section just responding to the FOX Moon Hoax special, with a very nice explanation of the diverging shadows and the waving flag. Whew! I feel better now... [Thanks to J for knowing this was bothering me and finding this site.]
Return of the Patterns: Years ago, I built an archive of links to free crochet patterns available online, sorted by category, with information about where the pattern was from, and if there was a picture of the finished product. It was very popular, but I hadn't set it up very intelligently and maintenance was a huge pain. I eventually stopped updating the site, and just let it be. By this past month, I think about 90% of the links were dead, and I was still getting over 1000 hits a week. I was also getting about a dozen e-mails a week telling me my site sucked and that I ought to take it down (some in less polite words than others - people get grumpy when you waste their time online).
So, I decided it was time to resuscitate the site: Amanda's Archive of On-line Crochet Patterns is back and fully operational. I've only got about 650 patterns linked so far, but I've got the right system in place to keep the site going. It's a rather odd combination of tools - MS Excel for the data management for each site and pattern, and a set of unix and sed scripts to build the pages from the data. If you're into crochet, or know someone who is, check it out.
What is this "crochet"?: Along that theme, The Crochet Collection is possibly the best collection of classic, American-style crochet patterns on the internet. All of the patterns have photos of the projects (some are just closeups...). And the selection captures what I think of as a very American version of the craft - lots of household objects, calling for relatively bulky yarn. Most projects are a combination of decorative and functional. Good use of scraps of leftover yarn. These are the roots of the American woman's creativity.
I want to believe...
The recognized truth is, those that a simple man must be in the possession of a wealth to the interior to a demand of a woman.
No credit if you simply know me well enough to know what line I would have chosen. [via Hissyfit]
Searchable Index of Calvin and Hobbs: Enter a text string, get all of the Calvin and Hobbs strips indexed by that string. The indexing could be better, but you can search on "snowman" and get the snowman strips, so I'm happy. [via MrBarrett]
'Windows 2000 Screenshots' R Us: Have you ever checked the stats on your web site and seen what web queries bring people to your page? Visit this collection of "disturbing search requests" to see what odd queries have brought people to various pages, or submit your own strange entries from your referrer logs. Most puzzling, to me, is the large number of people who come to my site from a search on "www.screenshot.com". Screenshot Tip of the Day - you don't need a search engine to take you to a URL.... [via RRE]
Weblogging in the classroom: I'm mighty pleased that my latest assignment for my UNIX class included asking my students to write a sed script that, given arbitrary text with URLs in it, finds the URLs and creates hyperlinks to them. I plan on using the version I wrote up to do a little weblog pre-processing of my notes to myself before I pull it all into FrontPage and add the pictures and such. I wouldn't want them to think their assignments were pointless....
the dragon...
versus
the cobra
Archive
of Entries
Background
Sites of the Week
Polls & Discussion
Update List
Portal