The 25 Largest (Fictional) Companies
Posted on July 16th, 2008 at 10:39 am by Steve

Soylent CorporationJust found this 2007 article from Forbes magazine listing the 25 largest fictional companies, by estimated 2007 revenue. Good for a chuckle or two.

Breaking It Down
Posted on July 14th, 2008 at 3:35 pm by Steve

Executive Summary:
Today's Congress

Details, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald:

Since that overwhelming Democratic victory, this is what the Democratic-led Congress has done:

Duly Noted: The Psycho-Industrial Complex
Posted on July 13th, 2008 at 1:26 pm by Steve

an enthusiastic habitDelightfully summarizing so much that is wrong with contemporary western capitalism, psychology, and industry:

“For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,” said Dr. [Carol] Berning, the Proctor & Gamble psychologist. “But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.”

You Know Things Are Bad…
Posted on July 11th, 2008 at 11:22 am by Steve

…when Dick Cheney is smiling:
Darth Cheney
I won’t even bother going into the details of the disastrous FISA legislation that was passed this week. Cheney’s smirk tells you everything you need to know.

Georgetown Law professor Marty Lederman sums it up thusly:

The new statute permits the NSA to intercept phone calls and e-mails between the U.S. and a foreign location, without making any showing to a court and without judicial oversight, whether or not the communication has anything to do with al Qaeda — indeed, even if there is no evidence that the communication has anything to do with terrorism, or any threat to national security.

If you want all the details, Glenn Greenwald has them, as usual.

Conservapedia & Evolving Bacteria
Posted on July 1st, 2008 at 12:21 pm by necco

 I ran across this interesting debate between a scientist and Conservapedia sparked by research showing that bacteria had evolved to process new types of food in a long running study. It’s well written and you can get the main points in the first few paragraphs so I won’t paraphrase:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/conservapedias-evolutionary-foibles.ars/1

So… I was wondering… who is going to start Liberalapedia? I think it would be hard to argue that this is what Wikipedia is given the number of contributors compared to the number of contributors to Conservapedia. And, if Liberalapedia is the opposite of Conservapedia I don’t want anything to do with it.