jra's thoughts

Month: April 2009

  • La promesse grippe – The Flu Code

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    Vinay Gupta published something called the flu code. Here it is in French: La promesse grippe 0.1Beta, version français – Une service dans l’intérêt publique de L’institute pour efrondnomiques Si j’ai des signes d’une grippe éventuel, je vais rester chez moi. Je vais rester à distance des foules quand c’est possible, et je vais toujours…

  • Fishy Accounting Business

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    Listen to this Planet Money episode, it’s got a really clear example of how banks are allowed to book profits based on people losing confidence in them. It’s really mind bending, and shows two things: one, how the finance industry is a hall of mirrors, and two, how talented Planet Money is at breaking down…

  • Is This the Big One?

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    We know that a pandemic is coming. We don’t know when and how. Something’s coming out of Mexico (though the index case might have been someplace else, too soon to tell). Is this the Big One, the pandemic that we are overdue for? I am gathering information here to make sure I understand it, and…

  • Lemon Custard, or Curd, depending on your skill

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    I used this recipe to make lemon custard. But I let it get too hot, so it curdled. So Mari got to sample Lemon Curd instead of Lemon Custard as intended. We liked it anyway! Hint to the reader (i.e. me if I come back to this next time I try it)… you could reasonably…

  • The IBM Tax

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    The IBM tax laid bare, from a promotional spam Amazon sent me: The hourly prices for Amazon EC2 running IBM are as follows: Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express – starting at $0.38/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup – starting at $1.31/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express – starting at $0.38/hour…

  • The Economics of being a Hostage

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    Wow. Here’s an incredible inside view of the piracy business. What’s incredible is that NPR’s Channa Jaffe Walt managed to get a CEO of a shipping company on the phone and hear the inside story of the negotiations. Here’s what’s really interesting. The first thing the CEO says is, “I never thought for a moment…

  • Heard in Europe

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    Overheard here in England (which was, last I checked, a European country): I found a really interesting partnership we could join, but we’d have to make friends with a bunch of Europeans. Insert sound of my jaw dropping the floor here…

  • A long trip in Afghanistan

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    This is an interesting story by a BBC correspondent, which pulls no punches. Easy to see why he was left feeling bitter. There are two sides to every story of course, and I’m sure the military folks would tell you about security rules, zero tolerance for violation of force protection imperatives, risk asessments, etc, etc,…

  • Post to your blog via e-mail

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    Posterous does the heavy lifting. Nifty. You have to give Posterous access to your blog. It would be nice if WordPress had a delegation feature, where I could make a user with a low privilege level for this.

  • Made me chuckle

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    I am a Slashdot addict, and one of the reasons are gems like these. The geek sense of humor is omnipresent: Police in Norfolk, England already have tracking units, The Automatic Vehicle Location System, installed in their cars that allow a control room to track their exact locations. Later this year a similar system will…