From Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s The Commanding Heights:
What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand [of government]. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans.
Via David Henderson at Econlog.
Give a 3 year old a hammer and they think everything is a nail.
The same thing happens to Excel users. They get to a certain skill level, pick up the IF statement, and realize that this can solve so many problems they’ve had in the past by nesting IFs.
The problem is that this method gets cumbersome, and troubleshooting it can be difficult.
Office for Mere Mortals has offered some alternatives including Lookup Tables and VBA, readers responded with tips for using MATCH, AND, OR, and especially CHOOSE.
Yahoo’s Search Pad goes live at midnight (on the right coast).
Tis the season for search improvements. Google has been killing, and we’ve got three competitors now.
Wolfram|Alpha was the first – it offers technical answers to technical questions posed in natural language. So far, I’m unimpressed.
Next came Bing from Microsoft. There isn’t much new here that Google can’t do – but I do like it better anyway.
Yahoo’s idea is that what people really need is a way to build a complex search. Search Pad will allow you to “record” a complex search as you build it. You must start from Yahoo, but Search Pad will access results from other sites (including Google and Bing). Then you pick the items you want from this site and record them in Search Pad. As you then refine your search, Search Pad keeps everything in one place. Basically – it’s all your post-it notes.
Useful? Yes. A Google-killer? I doubt it.
It’s not for me … but a few years ago I would’ve said I would never digitize my cassette tapes. But I did, and I’m very happy with the results.
From Best of the Web Today:
A Bloomberg report from last week quotes a Honduran Supreme Court justice, Rosalinda Cruz, explaining the situation:
"The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order," Cruz, 55, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. "There's no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts."
Why won't Obama listen? Does he have something against wise Latina women? [emphasis added]
I tend to think that the liberal media bias is relatively harmless in an established country like the U.S., but it’s sick when it is used to justify anti-Democratic actions in places that are trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Let’s face it: Google image search is annoying. You get a set of thumbnail images, you click one, and it takes you to another page with the exact same thumbnail and the source page you almost never look at. Then you have to click again to see the full size image.
You can skip all this with Google Image Relinker. It does two things: 1) it allows you skip those steps and just click to see the full-size image, and 2) it opens up the full-size image if you merely hover over the thumbnail.
FTNItK: Greasemonkey is an add-on for Firefox that manages and runs scripts: tiny programs that do just one useful thing to make your browser better.
Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson think they can explain why our sunspot minimum has been so long.
Unfortunately, they can’t explain why the cause is behaving the way it does: so the result isn’t very useful.
This is big news because of the current string of cold years the Earth has been having – in spite of anthropogenic global warming.
Via Spaceweather.com.
You read about superatoms here at vX about 4 years ago.
Basically, you combine atoms of an individual element into a molecule that shares those individual atoms electron clouds. Since a lot of chemistry is determined by the configuration of the outside shell of electrons, you can get the superatom to act like an element different from what is made of. I posted about getting sodium to act like helium, which is pretty cool because you could make something inert (like helium) out of something that isn’t, and pretty useful since you can’t make other stuff out of inert helium.
In a nutshell: it’s alchemy.
The new advance in this area is stable magnetism.
Magnetism is inherently unstable in the naturally occurring stuff. This is why wires can create magnetic fields only when there is current going through them. The reason is that the magnetism “wears off” as it gets “spread” across neighboring atoms.
To produce stable magnetism, they put the magnetic atom (vanadium) inside a shell of cesium which acts inert. The magnetism of the entire unit can’t get transferred somewhere else because the vanadium can’t come in contact with anything other than the inert cesium.
Via New Scientist.
JustSayHi - Free Personals
