Some sort of Cat

The greatest Wondermark ever, if not the greatest thing, ever:

Slightly switching gears, David Leonhardt on Obamonics in the Times.

And, in case you missed it, we released version 0.9 of the Android SDK. Its dreamy.

Broken Elevators

Via Google's Open Source Blog, this Google-sponsored project to study Linux I/O scheduler behavior is quite interesting, yielding unexpected results—for example, deadline is actually best for some workloads and CFS, while ideal for others, has awful worst-case performance.

Curious about I/O schedulers? Check out chapter 13 in my favorite kernel book. Want to optimize your code's file I/O and understand scheduling from the perspective of user-space? Read chapter 4 in my favorite system programming book.

Hummers, Cristal, and Cambodian Children: Hello, Nouveau Riche!

Hat tip to loyal reader for making me a billionaire:

Expires six months after issue

Somewhat unrelated, Amazon is running a special this month wherein you can try Amazon Prime Free for One Month—in other words, get a month of gratis two-day shipping. US only, unfortunately.

There is always money in the banana stand

Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion banknotes, each valued at one US dollar.

In all seriousness, for posterity, I would love to get one or two of these new bills. If anyone can help, I will pay handsomely.

EDGE puts me on Edge

The line of 3G-hopefuls outside of Boston's Apple Store:

The fervor Apple instills in their customers, particularly compared to their competitor, is impressive.

Incidentally, down the street, the line outside of the decidedly-less cool AT&T Store was only ten or so folks deep.

The Business of Elections

To date, clearly poised to surpass $1 billion before the cycle is over, the campaigns have spent a whopping $900 million. The New York Times, again proving that their core competency is in producing remarkably-informative graphics, has this rad little interactive visualization:

$4.3m to Verizon for cell phones!

See also the related article, Cashing In on Obama and McCain .

Martian Skies

Collected by the Boston Globe, these photos of Martian skies are without peer. There is a romance to exploring the unexplored, about going somewhere new simply because that's what's next.

It reminds me of President Reagan's speech, quoting from the poem High Flight, later cribbed by The West Wing, on the night of the "Challenger" disaster. Scheduled to give his state of the union, he spoke in lieu from the West Wing:

For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.

And I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."

Slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.

Anyhow, beautiful pictures.

Food Blog

I am keeping a food blog, Food Tastes Good. It is mostly recipes, such as,

• Curried Split Pea Soup
• Gnocchi with Butternut Squash, Sage, and Browned Butter
• Strawberry Rhubarb Sauce
• Red Wine Sangria

Do check it out, if that sort of thing interests you.

Growth, Inflation, Politics, and Mistakes

Mankiw on the corporate income tax:

The ultimate payers of the corporate tax are those individuals who have some stake in the company on which the tax is levied. If you own corporate equities, if you work for a corporation or if you buy goods and services from a corporation, you pay part of the corporate income tax. The corporate tax leads to lower returns on capital, lower wages or higher prices—and, most likely, a combination of all three.

Krugman on embedded versus non-embedded inflation:

Imagine that there are two entrepreneurs, Harry and Louise, both of whom change prices only at fairly long intervals—say, once a year. Other things equal, Harry want his average price over the next year to be about the same as Louise's; Louise wants her average price to be about the same as Harry's. But their price setting takes place on different dates. (This is a metaphor for the real economy, in which people setting prices have to think about the prices of many competitors and suppliers that will prevail until they revise the price again.) In this situation, inflation can feed on itself: Harry raises his price above Louise's, because he expects her to raise her price in the future, and she does the same thing when it's her turn.

Love on the 2008 US Presidential election:

Clinton, citing Puerto Rican victory, soldiers on ... PR cannot vote in general ... Obama 48 delegates shy of lock

Biz Stone on why the above is so damn slow:

We currently use one database for writes with multiple [sources say two] slaves for read queries. As many know, replication of MySQL is no easy task, so we've brought in MySQL experts to help us with that immediately. We've also ordered new machines and failover infrastructure to handle emergencies.

I can't believe this is Massachusetts

Crane Beach, Ipswich, MA