flickering pictures

Nathan over at FlowingData has stumbled upon yet another neat-o tool that’s as unscientific as it is fun to play with:

StateStats is like Google Insights but on a state level. Type in a search term and get Google search levels with correlations to certain “metrics” like obesity or support for Obama.

Since he’s a mature sort, […]

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The presidential pardon has got to be one of the strangest traditions in Washington. How exactly is justice served when an outgoing president hands out clean slates to a dozen or so convicted criminals, just because he’s a few weeks away from retirement? Why should a president have the power to bypass the […]

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When I first saw this little story on the Consumerist, I thought it had to be a joke. But out of curiosity, I googled it — and came up with 113,000 hits, a flag-waving liberty dollar nutbar website, and a too-strange-to-be-true article in the Washington Post:

Once upon a time, a “monetary architect” named Bernard […]

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Once again, the folks at FlowingData have taken reams and reams of inane-seeming data, compared it to scads and scads of other inane-seeming data, and turned the whole reamy scaddy mess into something fascinating. Check out these maps of cotton-picking intensity in 1860 and presidential voting today in America’s South — see anything interesting?

And […]

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Parts of South Dakota are buried under a staggering snowstorm that apparently came out of nowhere, and people are missing all over the state. I know South Dakotans are hardy and all, but isn’t it a little early in the season for this sort of thing?
CNN reports:

“We cannot see a thing in many areas […]

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Not that it’s any of my business, since I’m not American, but on behalf of the rest of the world, congratulations on choosing the best person for the job. We — and 52% of America — could be wrong about him, and we’ll have four years to find out, but in terms at least […]

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Peter Hitchens, an excellent — if fiercely conservative — writer and columnist at Britain’s right-leaning Daily Mail, is covering America’s pre-election mood from Moscow, Idaho, which is incidentally named after a town in Pennsylvania, not Russia. Though I don’t agree with his politics, his latest editorial piece is a thing of beauty — as […]

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Because they’re idiots, that’s why.

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I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when B sent me this link. Have a wander over to sarahpalin.com.

Hey Mark!
I was going to msg you with this, but saw that you’re marked “Do not disturb”. I was checking something on barackobama.com and thought why not check out johnmccain.com. I perused a bit and […]

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After more than a year, a Nebraska state senator’s lawsuit against God has finally worked its way through the courts and been dismissed — not because it’s silly, but because the legal paperwork omitted the defendant’s home address, in violation of state law.
From CNN:

State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha sued God [last year], seeking a […]

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