Levitt (one of the authors of Freakonomics) argues persuasively that child car seats are no better than regular lap-and-shoulder seat belts at protecting children older than two, but at least we can all agree that car seats are expensive pains in the ass. #

6-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss Of Formal Schooling. #

Liberty vs. control. #

Summertime kid pictures at left. It's been a pretty good summer. #

Light summer reading: lowered school performance not just of kids exposed to domestic violence, but also of kids exposed to kids (especially boys) exposed to domestic violence. Source article here. #

Holy crap: Neil Young has his whole Greendale album sitting on a (his) website. Makes me want to start trying again to get good at the guitar. #

The best T-shirts ever, which proclaim: Science! (Honorable mention to the green one here, though.) #

Winer: We won in Iraq a long time ago...Then came the occupation. There is no such thing as winning an occupation. You either continue to occupy or withdraw. It's semantic nonsense to apply the verb "win" to the noun "occupation." Seems pretty obvious when phrased that way. #

Mom displays her sick sense of humor (or is it dread? or bafflement?) by sending this to us just days before we all pile into planes for a family reunion:

The idea is to require all airline passengers to wear a "safety bracelet" that will be attached at check-in and removed when the passengers arrive at their destinations. The "safety bracelet" will contain all boarding information, seat assignment and personal information. It will eliminate the need for a boarding pass. Best of all, the "safety bracelet" also acts as a stun device capable of completely immobilizing passengers on command.

Farewell to the Holocene. #

At least twenty years too late to help this space's high school tenure, researchers notice that helping only low-achieving students leaves top students to wallow. Ah well. #

This Times article about creationists doing irritating school-related stuff is excellent for three reasons:

1. It contains good news for science,
2. it opens with a clever swipe at the opponents of teaching evolution, and
3. the clever opening swipe is a rhymed couplet.

WhatTheFont can tell you what font you have. Upload a picture of a couple of words and it guesses surprisingly well. #

What happens to dreams. #

A perfect description of what a bad week of work as a programmer is like. (It is not always this bad.) #

More kid pictures, visible at left. #

Bonus kid comic! Created in 15 minutes with the comic maker program I found on the now one-year-old laptop. It was sitting there the whole time. Who knew? #

So I was reading primary results, presented nicely as usual by the Times, when the top banner ad suddenly started blinking at me: your personal horoscope for free: click here! in all-caps, in a purple fake screenshot of a Windows screen, with a random picture of a sultry make-up-wearing chick, and did I mention that it was blinking like it was 1999? The ad was put there by my employer. The juxtaposition of this crap with the staid and well-designed tables and graphics of the primary results couldn't have been starker. I can't believe I get paid to annoy people like this, however indirectly. Oh man. #