How The World Works

Often, a picture's worth a whole bunch of words...

























Steve Sack at the Star Tribune nails it.

People Want Jobs

Via the Morning Plum comes this nugget from the latest NBC / WSJ poll...

The jobs bill would cut the payroll tax rate, fund new road construction, continue to extend unemployment benefits, and give tax credits to companies who hire and train long-term unemployed workers. The plan would be paid for by increasing taxes on the wealthy and increasing taxes on businesses by closing some corporate tax loopholes. Do you favor or oppose this plan?

Favor 63

Oppose 32

That's pretty cut and dried if you ask me.

Camouflage That For Me

You may already know that octopi are pretty freaking cool.  You're probably aware of the fact that they do some chameleon like things and you might have heard the story about the octopus in the aquarium that was climbing out of his tank every night, walking across the floor, climbing into the reef fish tank, hunting the fish, and then getting back in his tank (after putting the lids back on both tanks) before any of the staff showed up in the morning (they finally figured it out with a security camera).

But I bet you haven't seen anything quite like this...




Chameleons have nothing on these guys.


(via ES from fb)

Money Balls

Moneyball was a great book and while I haven't seen the movie yet it is on my list, I hear good things.

I mean any movie that spawns quality spoofs like these has to be pretty good...





This feels like a good time to note that, once again, the two top payroll teams will not be meeting in the world series.

Promoting Scientific Integrity

It's a big lift, and one of the ways that the Union of Concerned Scientists tackles the mission is with an annual scientific integrity editorial cartoon contest and calendar.  This year's winner and the 12 cartoons for the calendar were announced recently...

Congrats to John Klossner and all the other entrants.

You can see more of the cartoons on the UCS site.

Occupy Wall Street Grows Some Legs

The Occupy Wall Street protests started to spread this past weekend and they also started to pick up some news coverage.  One piece that didn't make it on air was this Fox News interview, I can't imagine why they left it on the cutting room floor...




Ezra Klein put together a good little link primer to get you up to speed with the protests.

Maybe this will actually spark something, I hope so.

Isolated Power

Islands have energy needs just like the rest of the world.  The folks who live on islands still want and need to be able to drive cars and boats, and have electricity and all of the modern comforts that it affords.  Most of the time this means shipping in fossil fuels and burning them in big noisy, dirty generators.  The generators tend to have issues and not function all that well all the time, not too mention the cost of shipping in the fuel.

A few island communities are starting to make the move to renewable energy sources, which allows the communities to power themselves without having to ship in so much fossil fuel.  The islands of Tokelau are the latest to get on board the bandwagon.  According to New Scientist by the middle of 2012 solar photovoltaic cells will power the grid on Tokelau with coconut oil generators picking up the slack.

Now all they need is a fleet of electric cars...