These past few weeks I've been listening obsessively to Eminem. It started innocently enough - a VH1 special back in March, a pleasant evening spent watching 8 mile. Next thing you know, I've turned into Michael Bolton from Office Space, shocking the cows with explicit lyrics as I zoom by on the morning commute. I realized that things had gotten bad today when I walked in on the

"When a program agrees to spend less money or accelerate a schedule beyond what the engineers and program managers think is reasonable, a small amount of overall risk is added. These little pieces of risk add up until managers are no longer aware of the total program risk, and are, in fact, gambling. Columbia Accident Investigation Report, pp 139 One of the most sobering conc…

	International Space Station	Iraq occupation through 2005	Dump million pounds of gold into Marianas trench
Cost (USD)	100 billion	104 billion	6 billion
Scientific Benefit:	data on long-term health effects of zero G	data on long-term health effe…

Insulating foam falls off of the external tank on every Shuttle mission, usually in popcorn-size pieces.

No one knows why foam falls off the tank.

On about 10% of missions, foam falls off of the left bipod ramp, part of the Y-shaped structure that holds the Orbiter's nose to the external fuel tank.

No one knows why this happens, either.

Pieces of foam that fall off of t…

This afternoon I paid a visit to the Getty, the unearthly palace of an art museum perched high on an L.A. mountain, overlooking everything.

Single people of Los Angeles: you must run, not walk, to the Getty Center. If you have a date, there is no other place you want to be, because the Getty Center is the architectural equivalent of a Barry White recor…

Henry David Thoreau writes in with some timely advice:

This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up to the garret at once.…

Premature mid-life crisis continues. I have been imagining myself facing a lineup of younger versions of me, and explaining what exactly I am doing here at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting. My twelve-year-old self asks why I am not in the Navy, my twenty-year-old self is shocked that I sold out to The Man, my six-year-old self freaks out at the fact that I'm still in the St…

Ben Hammersley is going to Afghanistan!

Movable Type meets Mujahedeen. It's going to be fun.

The unbearable weather continues - at seven in the morning I go for a jog, and the air is already stifling. It smells like a hamperful of gym socks pulled out of the drier ten minutes too soon. It rains every day. I ventured out into the garden today to look for ripe tomatoes, only to find that half of them had split open, unable to take the pressure. The most promising survivor, large and…

"I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on a full suit of armor and attacked a Hot Fudge Sundae or a Banana Split." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. That quote sums up exactly how I feel about the fight now brewing over weblog syndication formats. There's a prime case of tilting at sundaes up …

I've arrived in Los Angeles, waiting for the Big One to throw me out of the eighteenth floor of the Century Plaza Hotel. My room overlooks Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles, visible as a faint set of vertical lines through the brown mist. Nineteen years ago, I lived just a mile or two from here in Beverly Hills. My mother was a housekeeper for a funny old bat of a woman named Mrs. Ta…

We have our one millionth blog, and you'll never guess who it is. Who knew? I guess it's especially appropriate, since I'm listening to the book on tape as I type this. …

Sometime this morning, the Blog Census will pass the million blog mark. I'm tempted to call these BogoBlogs, in homage to Linus Torvalds and his dislike for dubious, arbitrary statistics. But however bogus the count, hey - we got a million!…

Sometime this morning, the Blog Census will pass the million blog mark. I'm tempted to call these BogoBlogs, in homage to Linus Torvalds and his dislike for useless, arbitrary statistics. But because I had to wake up early to fix the number formatting code to put in the second comma, I feel like indulging in a little attention-seeking. Not to be con…

I used to cringe when people told me they were thinking of visiting Warsaw. It was like hearing that someone was planning to go to a Bob Dylan concert. You knew that, unless they understood the complicated historical trajectory involved and had an immense reserve of good will, chances are they would have an awful time. I have always been a great fan of my home town (and Bob Dylan, for that …

Next week I am going to be in Los Angeles for the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. I am not an archivist, just a dabbler, and I figure this is a good chance to learn from people who actually know what they're doing. I had visions of cardigans and wire-rim glasses in my head, but these archivists are a surprisingly active bunch. The list of pre-conference tours includes a…

If you're a political blogger, then chances are you have a penis! Read all about it on the new Blog Census weblog. My own theory on the scarcity of female warbloggers is that they're kept too busy ironing all those brown shirts.…

If you're a political blogger, then you probably have a penis! Read all about it on the new Blog Census weblog. Yummy bar charts included. My own theory on the scarcity of female warbloggers: kept too busy ironing all of hubby's brown shirts. …

If you're a political blogger, then chances are you have a penis! Read all about it on the new Blog Census weblog. My own theory on the scarcity of female warbloggers? Kept too busy ironing all of hubby's brown shirts! …

It's another bachelor weekend here at the Idle Words compound, as the better half motors south into the haze to attend a Renaissance Fair(e?) with her sister. Since this sister is pretty handy with a sword, I think I am going to skip the usual cute comments about Renaissance Fairs, and just wish them a good time. I hear there is going to be jousting. Bachelor weekend has so far meant the ta…

Waypath is now offering RSS feeds for individual search queries. That means you can monitor changing search results in your aggregator. Very cool. We had per-search feeds working on LazyWeb for a while, but then I broke the search engine altogether... Kudos to Steve and Martin for continuing …

This is a little taste of it…

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I've found it! The most boring weblog on the Internet!…

Tonight we tested the better half's newly acquired vegan principles in the crucible of the Addison County Fair and Field Days, the local summer agricultural fair, where every animal on display is also conveniently available served hot on a kaiser roll.

Winner: Fair and Field Days, by a margin of…

Yesterday I went with the better half to my first lesson in Supreme Ultimate Fist. The instructor calls it by its Chinese name, T'ai Chi, but I think that's doing a disservice to the unsung marketing genius behind it. Go ahead and study "the way of harmony of the spirit" , "empty hand", or even "the way of foot and fist"*, nancy boy. I'll just be …

Eight hundred thousand weblogs and counting!…

The Berkman Center Ourobouros strikes again: an essay about the importance of linking to others, where all the hyperlinks just point back to himself.

You can't make this stuff up.…

Two articles you shouldn't miss. The first, via Slashdot, is a lawyer's take on the strange Talmudic intricacies of copyright law:

It is, for example, technically against the law for Girl Scouts to sing "This Land Is Your Land" and "Puff, the Magic Dragon" around a campfire withou…