An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Sunday, March 21, 2010

WaPo stats on healthcare voting in the US. Show (by eyeballing, anyway, & as pointed out by James of England) no correlation between voting patterns and either health industry donations or number of uninsured constituents.

This strikes me as pretty weird. Maybe an excuse to load the data into pandas and play round with it.

Friday, March 19, 2010

EU and ACTA

The EU parliament are something like the House of Lords -- you don't tend to pay them much attention, or really trust them, but every now and again they come through and Do The Right Thing when the rest of the Powers That Be are in thrall to some ridiculous lobbyist-enhanced monstrosity.

Last week is one of those cases: the European Parliament has passed a resolution thoroughly condemning the secrecy of the ACTA negotiation process, in terms that are, compared to the normal EU bureacratese, pretty fierce:

2. Expresses its concern over the lack of a transparent process in the conduct of the ACTA
negotiations, a state of affairs at odds with the letter and spirit of the TFEU; is deeply concerned
that no legal base was established before the start of the ACTA negotiations and that
parliamentary approval for the negotiating mandate was not sought;

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Rolling Stone on pig farming

Rolling Stone still has an incredible collection of writers:

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier.