Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

18 inch eyes, 60 feet long, eats whales? Washed up on the shore in Tasmania.

Meanwhile, don’t miss these amazing videos and photos of a new species of squid discovered in 2001!

Are you doing disaster planning for earthquakes, or a telecom industry meltdown? Can you treat them the same?
The article mentioned in the prior posting implies the folks at eBay do.

Do they have similar distributions?

Indeed they are quite similar. This graph shows how the distribution of earthquakes vs. scale is another power law curve. Most of the energy(wealth) is reserved for the very rare very huge earthquakes.

Humm… what about tornados.

I’m now finally reading Barabasi

AT&T Broadband’s privacy policy? They can release unlimited info about your browsing to third parties!

The privacy policy is an eight page legal document. The copy delivered to my house had each page reduced to one-quarter size. There is a paragraph in the middle of the document that is over a page long. The last two sentences in that paragraph have 96 words

Here is the relevant fragment of those two sentences:

… when you use cable Internet services, certain information maybe disclosed to third parties providing content or services on the … platform. Such disclosure may include without limitation … other information about your … electronic browsing …

It explicitly states that there is no limit on what information maybe released. While they have a limit on who’s included amoung third parties: they must be providing content or services on the “intereactive TV platform”. Who provides content? Do the networks, the media companies, advertisers, news outlets, and the government provide content?

Update: When I wrote this I had a web site on their cable system. Presumably back then I was one of these third parties.

The Republican Party in New Mexico tried to bribe the Green Party there to run cantidates. No need for the Republican party chairman to resign -
he was just acting as a messenger for an unidentified source in Washington, D.C.

I don’t have much sympathy for third parties. We have a two party system here and third parties are very disruptive. If you want change then you have to change one of the parties.

The Republicans were buying a far left cantidate with two purposes in mind. First: the Democrat would lose votes on his left. Second: if he moved toward the left in an attempting recapture those votes he would lose votes on his right.

This is what George Wallace did on the right during the civil rights era and what Nader did on the left in the last election.