Finally, an interview with Pete Sampras’ personal stringer who used to travel to every tournament and restring all of Sampras’ racquets right before each match! If that meant cutting out $35 unused natural gut strings, then so be it.
While we’re on tennis—Pete Sampras used the same racquet his entire career. But more remarkable is that all the racquets he used were made in one specific Wilson Tennis factory located in the Carribean. The factory closed in 1991, well before the end of Sampras’ career.
Turns out a lot of high profile tennis professionals have their older racquets painted to look like their sponsor company’s latest offering. Props to Sampras for sticking with the same racket for his entire career.
An e-mail sent to billgates+microsoft@gmail.com actually goes to billgates@gmail.com. You can do this as much as you want—every thing after the + is removed. As this article suggests, this is a great way to track down who is selling your e-mail address.
This is an awesome thing to do by the city and Google. Not only that, it’s smart.
The move by the city and the company would allow someone to be able to fill out a job application, which asks for a call back number.
There are two Kansas Cities: Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas. They become two cities because the state line splits the Kansas City area into two. The Missouri side is more metropolitan and is home of the Chiefs and Royals. Apparently when you are in Kansas or Missouri, what side you are from is a big deal; when traveling, however, most people will just say they hail from “Kansas City.”
An interesting profile on Robert Levy, a lawyer with the Cato Institute, and his role in creating what is now DC v. Heller, a case which has reached the US Supreme Court and could lead to a very important decision regarding interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.
Young males should be getting vaccinated for HPV, as this article points out. However, the writer fails to mention that HPV can lead to an increased risk of oral cancer. As this Time article points out, “When you look at the cancers associated with HPV in men — including penile cancer, anal squamous cell carcinoma, oral cancers — it’s very close to the number of cases of cervical cancer that occur in the U.S. in women every year.”
Break the rules (allegedly) and get bought out for $750k. Luckily for Indiana, a donor gave $550k to help with the buyout which protects the university from being sued.
This is excellent. Last summer Muqtada al-Sadr declared a six month ceasefire for his Mahdi Army, and it has been largely responsible for the decline in violence in Iraq. The less fighting there are between Iraqi groups, the easier it is for coalition and Iraqi forces to establish order and neutralize other threats (e.g. Al Qaeda-Iraq, which has ties to Iran).
I wish the candidates would stand during the Democratic debates. And they should put some space between them so they don’t have to turn their heads awkwardly when the other is speaking. CNN probably likes it because a) easier to get both candidates in the same shot and b) if they’re close to each other it looks like they are debating instead of delivering speeches—even if they are really delivering speeches.
Turns out the seven-time Tour de France winner is an atheist. This took me by surprise because I thought he was close with President Bush, but it turns out he’s at least implicitly opposed the war in Iraq:
“Funding [for cancer research] is tough to come by these days,” he says. “The biggest downside to a war in Iraq is what you could do with that money. What does a war in Iraq cost a week? A billion? Maybe a billion a day? The budget for the National Cancer Institute is four billion. That has to change. It needs to become a priority again.
Hillary goes negative. = /
I find the disigenuous smear ad particularly frustrating. Obama’s plan does not have a mandate—so if you choose not to have health insurance you won’t be penalized. The only people who might not have insurance under Obama’s plan but would under Hillary’s are adults who decide that they don’t want to pay for it, even at a subsidized rate. In all probability, it would still cost less than Hillary’s plan. Nobody will be “left out.”
Additionally, there is no “Republican attack machine” at least nothing that’s worse than this. I guarantee McCain will run a cleaner, more honest campaign. It will focus on actual issues rather than distortions.
For those conservatives terrified at the thought of “judicial dictatorship,” it’s worth remembering that it was judicial restraint, not activism, that allowed these egregious violations [the Japanese internment camps] of both fundamental rights and basic justice to occur.
Chairman Silvestre Reyes of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence replies elegantly to Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and the Bush administration’s questionable arguments for the extension of FISA changes.
Money quote:
We cannot allow ourselves to be scared into suspending the Constitution. If we do that, we might as well call the terrorists and tell them that they have won.
For years, Wikipedia’s inconsistent line heights have driven me crazy. It is caused by the superscripted numbers that link to footnotes. Follow these directions and, when you are logged in, this problem will be eliminated.
When you get to the page linked above, paste the code into the new page created when you click on the “User:[you]/monobook.css” link.
Update: This problem apparently does not occur in Firefox, so this is for you Safari and Opera users out there.
Def.: Republicans that support Barack Obama.
Usage:
“Sometimes they whisper to me when I’m shaking hands, they’ll say ‘Barack, I’m a Republican, but I support you.’ We call them Obamicans. We’re going to get some Obamicans in this election.” (source)
I used to name all my computers and gadgets with a “silver” theme. ….
I’m fascinated with the idea of naming hardware with themes (most people tend to do this), and I’d love to hear some of your crazy hardware names.
I set up a new system of kiosks at the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame. There are three Mac Minis that display to touch screens. They are wirelessly connected to a server computer in my office. Also, I’ve written a backend webapp through which I update the server’s database. Because there are three kiosks, and as a nod to my hometown of Santa Maria, CA, I decided to go with a Christopher Columbus theme.
So, the three kiosks are:
The wireless network is named “Atlantic,” the wireless base station “The New World,” and the server “Columbus.” Finally, the update app that I wrote is called Ferdinand.
P.S. The non-admin user account on Columbus is “Deckhand.”
Good article challenging the assumption that a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon is likely.
Money quote:
Mueller recalls that after the Irish Republican Army failed in an attempt to blow up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it said, “We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Al Qaeda, he says, faces a very different challenge: For it to carry out a nuclear attack, everything has to go right. For us to escape, only one thing has to go wrong.
The trouble is, intel agencies would rather err on the side of caution than be wrong and have something catastrophic occur. If you are an analyst, you can predict for a year that there may be a nuclear terrorist attack soon. When it does not happen, no big deal, you keep your job and no one dies. If you predict that there will not be one in the future, and it happens, then you are in a much worse position.
As citizens, though, always erring on the side of caution leads to a population living in fear. And unfortunately, such a society gladly allows the erosion of civil liberties because of this fear.
General Wesley Clark is visiting UCLA on Monday, and lecturing to my National Security Policy course about the Kosovo conflict. I don’t know a whole lot about this yet, but if anyone has a question they’d like to see asked let me know.
US Olympic Committee Caterer, Wary U.S. Olympians Will Bring Food to China - New York Times
This is a compelling reason for why the Olympic Committee should not have chosen China as the site for 2008. What does this do to poorer countries? Not every country can ship thousands of pounds of food to Beijing before the Olympics, but if they eat Chinese chicken they risk being exposed to steroids?
She’s lowering expectations for tomorrow’s caucus, and then campaigning hard. Any “decent” loss then becomes a win.
Reason editor Kerry Howley on one way in which REAL ID puts good honest people at risk:
The REAL ID concept poses myriad civil liberties issues, and survivors of domestic abuse pose a small—and perhaps surmountable—problem in a much larger debate over national idenfication. But their predicament lays bare the hubris of a government that thinks itself so completely just, so perfectly coordinated, that no honest person ever needs to hide. DHS officials may claim that no one can be secure so long as anyone remains off the grid, but they risk destroying the lives of people for whom the only real security remains anonymity itself.
A similar question to the following was on Reddit today:
from Pepper - Matt, Nick, and I are watching Super Tuesday returns and have come up with a question: if you were born on a US military base abroad /or/ within a US embassy abroad—both technically US soil by popular account— do you meet the “born in the USA” test that qualifies you to run for the presidency? Or must you be born exactly in one of the 50 states?
Article II of the Constitution says “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”
Of course, how to define “natural-born citizen” is not clear cut. However, it is my understanding that McCain was born to two American parents, which might qualify him.
This is disappointing, but she seems to have a clear lead.
A thought on my previous post re: Edwards’ votes: Slate reported earlier that approx. 1/3 of Californians vote absentee, so that 10% supporting Edwards must be absentee voters. At least one CNN analyst has said he thinks that Edwards supporters have been voting for Obama in other states, so the Obama camp cannot be happy about the delegates they may have lost because of absentee ballots.
Edwards is drawing 10% of the vote in California. FYI, he left the race. If I can keep myself from voting for Joe Biden then I’m pretty sure you too could have picked one of the remaining two candidates.
Update: I’m an idiot, this is obviously from absentee ballots mailed in before Edwards left the race. Thanks squashed for pointing this out.
I didn’t see Sen. Clinton’s speech tonight, but Sen. Obama’s was pretty dang incredible. Doesn’t look good for him so far in California, but seems this race is far from over.
Here’s a good breakdown by county from the LA Times.
If you are male, and your sole reason for voting for Obama is because he has a Y chromosome, then you are sexist. If you’re a woman, and you vote for Obama, you are breaking ranks with your gender.
I just looked at Gmail’s markup in Firebug. It’s such a clusterfuck of nested DIVs. I’m looking to make a CSS skin but not sure if I have time to deal with that mess.
Send up to two three-page faxes a day via the Interwebs. Accepts Word documents or PDFs.
A quick tutorial by Panic corrects the assumption that Coda cannot be used with a locally hosted web server. This actually was the case with 1.0. I tried out Coda when it was first released and was frustrated because of this inability. Coda gets a lot of press, but I find it hard to imagine leaving TextMate behind.
My beautiful new tumblr theme, from sid05
