Christopher

Vote for Python

In February of 2007 I attended my second Pycon, a conference devoted to the open source programming language Python. One of the coolest system of presentations I saw were the lightning talks. Each presenter gets only 5 minutes to give his spiel. The one that made the biggest impression on me was by Ka-Ping Yee. He demonstrated how using less than 300 lines of code could make electronic voting much more...

Christopher

Toxoplasma neoconi

After reading the website Media Matters, which takes the mainstream media to task, I can come to only one conclusion: brain parasites. Yes, brain parasites have completely taken over pundits like Bill Kristol, Mike Savage, and Neal Boortz. Nothing else comes close to explaining the the insanely hateful things they utter. I suppose it’s possible they are actually living in some sort of...

Christopher

Dollar Coins and Vending Machines

I like vending machines and I wish they’d take dollar coins. They take dollar bills and that’s good, but have you ever tried to put a crumpled dollar bill into a vending machine. You have to go through all sorts of contortions to flatten it out and feed it in. And then it’ll spit it back out. You’ll try this five or six times until it takes it or not. Sometimes even a new dollar...

Christopher

Petro-Euro

The unholy trinity that affects the US are fundamentalists, oil, and debt. When you read American Theocracy by Kevin Philips, each becomes scarier than the next. Debt by far is the biggest threat facing America, public and private. I then thought of the old adage ‘follow the money’. Lo and behold I found it. Oil is paid for by US dollars (petrodollars) on the international market. Iraq was...

Christopher

Socialized Medicine

America has one of the best health care systems in the world. Not everyone, however, has equal access to it. It is not governed by the free market. Some want universal health care which is another name for socialized medicine. We’ve seen how well socialized medicine works in Canada and the UK. That is to say, not. Indian health care and military health care is socialized, as is Medicare and Medicaid....