Archive for July, 2006
Laci and Conner’s Law
Thursday, July 27th, 2006
Unborn Victims of Violence Act
“I have serious concerns about this legislation because the law cannot simultaneously provide that a fetus is a human being and protect the right of the mother to choose to terminate her pregnancy.”
- John Kerry
I don’t agree with Kerry on much, but I certainly commend him for his stance on this law.
‘r’ Is The New ‘e’
Thursday, July 27th, 2006
An interview with the letter ‘e’.
Inflation Adjusted Wages Take a Dive
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
Commonly referred to as the middle class squeeze, inflation adjusted wages took a nose dive last year. I wonder if this will take center stage over the middle east in the upcoming elections?
But things do seem to be improving somewhat -
CNN – Real wages are having trouble keeping up with prices
For the 24-month period through the second quarter of 2005, the inflation-adjusted wages of an average American grew just 1 percent or so, according to statistics reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Despite overall sluggish wage growth, there are still areas of strength; the majority of the 316 largest counties in the United States — those with employee rolls of 75,000 or more — reported average wage increases that outpaced inflation for the 24 months ended June 30, 2005, the latest county data available from the BLS. Forty four of the counties had real wage growth of 3 percent or more during the period.
The above article has some great statistics on wage growth by county in the U.S. over the last two years.
UPDATE
The Economic Policy Institute indicates things have now turned around substantially according to their July 7th snapshot, although the slowing job market may take the wind out of the sails:
The unemployment rate held steady at 4.6%, and wages were up 0.5% hourly and 0.8% weekly, reversing May’s much weaker wage results. Over the past year, wages are up 3.9% hourly, the fastest growth rate since June 2001; with the advance in average weekly hours, weekly earnings are up 4.5% over last year, their highest rate since February 1998.
According to the Labor and Statistics report:
Average hourly earnings of production or nonsupervisory workers on private
nonfarm payrolls rose by 7 cents, or 0.4 percent, in July to $16.76, season-
ally adjusted. Average weekly earnings also increased by 0.4 percent in July
to $568.16. Over the year, average hourly earnings increased by 3.8 percent,
and average weekly earnings increased by 4.1 percent. (See table B-3.)
For an alternative view, the Center For American Progress claims these wage increases are being out stripped by inflation and rising costs on items such as transportation and tuition.
2008 Elections
Monday, July 24th, 2006
Oh I know, you don’t even want to start thinking about this now.. but someone got me reading political blogs recently (argh) and I ended up on Wikipedia reading about 2008′s prospects. Odd I seem to be breaking my blogging on politics rule a lot lately, oh well.
I’m not a big fan of any if the current front runner dems & reps, but I do however like what I’ve read about Giuliani. Moderate republican, pro-choice but he’s apparently against partial birth abortions (check), pro gun control (check), pro gay rights (check), an advocate of state’s rights (check), tough on crime, especially white collar crime (check), used heavy handed tactics to clean the streets of New York of panhandlers and their trash (check), champion of low government spending (check), lead the city through 9/11 showing he can lead under crisis (check), is somewhat of a womanizer which I can let go and heck, the dems certainly can’t criticize him on it and keep a straight face (check), and Al Sharpton doesn’t like him (check). Baring any major gaffs or hidden secrets, Giuliani looks to be a good pick so far. I’ll need some foreign policy clarifications but aside from that, am I missing anything?
UPDATE #1 – Also, he’s pro nuclear energy and bio-desiel fuels. (check)
Wikimapia
Monday, July 24th, 2006
About WikiMapia
WikiMapia is a project to describe the whole planet Earth.How to use
Just move the map to find interesting places, click on rectangles. To add an interesting place or object use Add New link. Note: Please only add places interesting to everyone.Who We Are
Wikimapia was created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev, inspired by Google maps and Wikipedia.Contact us
Your suggestions, ideas and bug reports are welcome. You may contact us using email: wikimapia@gmail.com
I was amazed at how many locations down here in my sleepy little beach side town have been identified. This could easily replace Google Maps as the default way you navigate that service, although I have to wonder if Google might take issue with that sometime down the road. I’m also curious how long it will be before Google starts serving up ads directly in it’s map interface (Like mappoint currently does) in an effort to take advantage of the mashups like this.
Nuclear Energy
Monday, July 24th, 2006
The co-founder of Greenpeace gets behind nuclear energy -
The 600-plus coal-fired plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2 annually — the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles. In addition, the Clean Air Council reports that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. These pollutants are eroding the health of our environment, producing acid rain, smog, respiratory illness and mercury contamination.
Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2 emissions annually — the equivalent of the exhaust from more than 100 million automobiles. Imagine if the ratio of coal to nuclear were reversed so that only 20 percent of our electricity was generated from coal and 60 percent from nuclear. This would go a long way toward cleaning the air and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every responsible environmentalist should support a move in that direction.
Personally I’m all for nuclear power. There was a big paranoid stink back in the 70s that basically killed the development of new nuclear power plants. Maybe it’s time we revisit the idea now that global warming is reaching center stage and the paranoia over nuclear power plants has subsided. People had less faith in science back then, hopefully this has changed.
Jessica Biel
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006
Yep, has to be said, Too Sexy. Loved her in Blade : Trinity. Speaking of which, if your not watching the new Blade series on Spike, plug it into Tivo right now. The show is action packed and sexy, and the writing isn’t half bad either.
Free Source Search Indexer Library
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006
Hat tip to my friend Dru for pointing me to Lucene, and Lucene.NET – a free, fast search indexer written in .NET.
Features:
- Very good performance
- Ranked search results
- Search query highlighting in results
- Searches structured and unstructured data
- Metadata searching (query by date, search custom fields…)
- Index size approximately 30% of the indexed text
- Can store also full indexed documents
- Pure managed .NET in a single assembly
- Localizable (support for Brazilian, Czech, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Russian included in DotLucene National Language Support Pack)
- Extensible (source code included)
- Lucene.Net is a port of Jakarta Lucene to .NET (C#) maintained by George Aroush
This thing is fast too! Nice. Ive been looking for a nice search indexer for Daisy and some other stuff I’m experimenting around with on the server side, this looks like an excellent solution so far. It’s licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0. I must be a little behind the times on this, considering I’m finding that Lucene implementations are the search technology behind web projects like Technorati, and desktop apps like Lookout (Now MS Desktop Search) Beagle, and RSS Bandit.
On a side note, I really love it when I find a free source library on the net that really works for what I’m doing. I think developers who work on these projects represent the truest form of altruism, unlike the more perverse forms of Open Source which adopt licenses like the GNU GPL. I’ve developed one free source library myself, and enjoyed the positive vibes you get from working on these projects.
Apple’s Video IPod To Support 3D?
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006
Might make a nice hand held gaming platform if this prediction about nVidia supplying the chips turns out to be true. If it does support gaming, I’d guess it might also support wireless. I wonder how apple would handle the licensing of the development environment for such a device.
Roe vs. Wade
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006
“We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”
Relying on the current state of medical knowledge, the decision established a system of trimesters that attempted to balance the state’s legitimate interests with the individual’s constitutional rights. The Court ruled that the state cannot restrict a woman’s right to an abortion during the first trimester, the state can regulate the abortion procedure during the second trimester “in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health,” and in the third trimester, demarcating the viability of the fetus, a state can choose to restrict or even to proscribe abortion as it sees fit.
