The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross ( Read more... )

Apparently there's some identifying mark on my ballot, so that I can (given the receipt) check to see if my ballot has been counted.  This disturbs me:  I doubt that they've properly preserved the secret-ballot guarantees.  But then, there's a lot of things about our election system that are kind of odd ( Read more... )

I recently got the current Humble Bundle, which includes "Human Resource Machine".  It's an odd game:  It feels like playing a game, and it equally feels like programming in assembly language.  (I think they describe it as a single-accumulator Harvard archictecture machine, which is pretty accurate ( Read more... )

I introduced Newton's Method to Amber tonight, since she's been very interested in the square root of two recently, and Newton's Method is a pretty good way to approximate it.  Also, I thought she might be ready for the process ( Read more... )

Today I got mistaken for a senior citizen, and also got carded.

Either age is really hard, or people aren't paying attention.

Given that I got carded for buying soda, I'm going for the not-paying-attention explanation.

The Burglary, by Betty Medsger ( Read more... )

It's finally time to retire my old laptop, the one that we've been using as a home server for a while. The screen had stopped working, but that didn't matter so much for server use. Last night, however, something else failed and it won't do networking anymore ( Read more... )

I'm trying to sort out how the various pieces fit together: Early in the crisis, there were a lot of regulatory actions that, taken as a whole amounted to "giving money to banks". For example, the Federal Reserve started paying interest on reserves, which is a bank-only bonus; similarly, loaning banks money so that they can buy treasury bonds is ( Read more... )

I'm trying to figure out the motivation behind the SEC's experiment:

http://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/1370542172819#.U72O6XVdXmG

(Via a reference in Kid Dynamite's blog postIn short, they're picking a few ( Read more... )

One of the interesting bits of the crisis in Ukraine is that in 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for a security guarantee. Russia, the US and the UK supposedly guarantee Ukraine's integrity; the value of this guarantee looks dubious at present ( Read more... )