Internal Monologue

A major annoyance of the Internet world turns 30 .

There are a lot of wasted brain cycles out there : So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that e...

Yes, she has a lot more money than he does. (She's heir to a beer fortune, I think.) But McCain probably does have more than a single checking account. Everything else is in his wife's name .

MADE IN CHINA Image from The Adventure Blog Ah, the ironies made possible by the forces of globalization. Here's BBC News : Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say. The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning. But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper. I don't know what's funnier: that the people who wanted to make "Free Tibet" flags sent the order to China of all places, or that a Chinese factory was manufacturing pro-Tibetan independence paraphernalia.

Take a look at this map . Kos does the math: Clinton does better than Obama in 6 states totalling 92 electoral votes. Obama does better than Clinton in 15 states totalling 164 electoral votes. This map has Minnesota for either Democrat. I thought Minnesota was a swing state; it has a Republican governor. But maybe it isn't. That would be good news. Anyway, I know Obama is polling way better there. One gripe: did the map really need to use the color brown for Obama and pink for Clinton? C'mon. As if their race and gender haven't been emphasized enough. Anyway, here's something else to consider: the states where Obama does better are states that have important senate races: Based on what we have seen so far this year, Hillary Clinton will have bigger coattails in the rust belt and Barack Obama will have bigger coattails out West. Only there aren't any contested Senate races in the rust belt and there are several in the West (Alaska, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, an...

They exist ! I want them! EN World has photos of some internal pages: Two things I can't wait for: the arrival of my 4th Edition D&D books and the end of the Democratic primary.

Massawyrm wrote a 3-part glowing review of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons ( part 1 , part 2 , part 3 ): Let me just say this upfront. I. Love. 4E. And I didn’t want to. Much like many of you out there, the 3.5 partial reboot just five years ago pissed me off. But we’ve spent 8 years now with the better part of this system. And hell, even 5 years is a long time. But Massawyrm, you’re thinking you don’t know how much I’ve spent on 3.5. No? Here at the Casa de la Wyrm we don’t have a D&D bookshelf. We have a D&D closet. It’s where I keep my boxes of Dwarven Forge Master Maze, my big plastic bins of D&D Minis, and two long shelves of over $1000 in 3.5 books. But just 2 weeks into playing 4E, I boxed up every non-fluff heavy book I owned, drove down to Half Price Books and sold them for as much cash as I could get. I knew I would never, ever, touch them again. Yes. 4E really is that good. It is the XBOX 360 to your XBOX. And it is time to upgrade my friends. The folks on ...