paul schreiber

moses runs the numbers:

There is only one logical integration of all these statistics with the recent Soundscan data: even though actual point-of-purchase sales are up by about 9% in the US – and the industry sold over 13,000,000 more units in 2004 (1st quarter) than in 2003 (1st quarter) – the Industry is still claiming a loss of 7% because RIAA members shipped 7% fewer records than in 2003.

Forget the confusing percentages, here’s an oversimplified example: I shipped 1000 units last year and sold 700 of them. This year I sold 770 units but shipped only 930 units. I shipped 10% less units this year. And this is what the RIAA wants the public to accept as “a loss.”

Scientific American has a great op-ed satirizing creationism:

There’s no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don’t mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there’s no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

one guy was not happy when his machine died:

“There was one restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer,” Norman said. “That destroyed the laptop … and deep fryer, too.”

So this guy catches a plagiarist, Laura K Pahl, then tries to cover it up by changing her name (but doesn’t change the URL). Ooops. And Laura goes to Lewis University. (And he didn’t change James Gaffney’s name.)

Yay Google cache.

The Boston Globe on the Prius love:

Then there’s the hipness factor: ”I’ve had a lot of kids tell me that this is way cool,” she says, ”and at age 52, I have very few ways to be way cool.” When she first started driving the old Prius, it was, she says, ”a guy magnet.” For a certain type of guy, anyway. ”I would go out, and guys in Subaru Outbacks with Greenpeace stickers and L.L. Bean shirts would come over,” she says.

Wired talks about the Prius:

But the marketing department knew that only a special customer would pay $20,000 for a compact car. Specifically, someone with a master’s degree, a six-figure income, and a fondness for composting.

Oh well, I’m 0-for-3 on that one. :)

Any movie that starts with 50 japanese schoolgirls jumping in front of a speeding train is by default messed up.

Gerald Weinberg talks about what it was like to be a real programmer:

A San Francisco oil company, which couldn’t accept the coast-to-coast turnaround time, requested an IBM machine of its own (at a cost of roughly $20 million) to run an application that blended oil from its distillation towers everyday. According to Weinberg, performing the blending optimally based on that day’s oil prices was worth about $1 million a day to the company. Weinberg wrote the program for them, because—like nearly all large companies at that time—it didn’t have a programming staff. “When you bought a machine from IBM,” he explained, “you got me with it—free.”

Buying a machine wasn’t a simple proposition, however. “You had to justify to IBM that you were a worthy user,” said Weinberg. “Sure enough, they turned down this order because the [blending] calculation only took less than an hour a day. I found a problem with the program, and by the time I fixed it, it was taking eight hours a day.”

boy attacks easter bunny at mall.