...when your employer writes you an e-mail saying: We wrote you a check for $90 two years ago, and you never cashed it. Want another?

On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stuart talked about Obama's recent announcement about limiting the trading activities of banks, "taking on" the banking industry. There was some joking about how the banks should give up because the guy has an army, leading up to the big reveal of what their strategy is: taking the economy "hostage" (he replayed a ( Read more... )

This (about Cass Sunstein and secret government propoganda, via Tim Burke is really scary/disapointing.

(I hadn't heard about Gruber and health care.)

Just saw James Fowler on Colbert talking about social networks (Connected), and he made a claim about there being a causal relationship between Colbert gaining weight and a friend of a friend of Colbert gaining weight.

I was glad to see in the New York Times Book Review that in the book he actually makes a case that the relationship really is ( Read more... )

At the coffee shop, I overheard a few people (econ grad students? or something like that?) talking, one mentioning the auction website Swoopo (which I'd never heard of-- they sell various items with a starting auction price of zero, and you can pay $0.60 to make a bid, which increments the current price by $0.12--so the winner ends up with the item ( Read more... )

In response to a request twittered by a friend ( Read more... )

I moved my laundry from the washer to the dryer, then loaded my quarters into the empty washer.
Time to stop grading and go to bed, I think.

The rest is pretty standard anti-abortion rhetoric, but I'd never heard this before:

"P.S. Social Security is failing because abortion has eliminated expected future workforces in our economy."

Wow.

"You could figure out the first eigenvalue of the internet, and might be troubled by it."
Last thing he said in class: "Now I've said too much. Or too little. Or really both."

Annoyed about how the textbook from which I'm teaching calculus implicitly quantifies over the reals when it defines limits. Instead of quantifying over the domain. Also instead of being explicit about anything.

(So sqrt(x) only has a right-sided limit at 0, not a limit.)

It might be the right thing to do (I'm not sure), but it's still annoying.