Posts

The blogger behind Pro Football Reference on the possible downsides of the NFL expanding its regular season schedule to 17 games, with every team playing one game overseas: Now, apart from the international aspect of it, there is the issue of the 17th regular season game itself. Many fans seem to object to this, and I’m not sure I see why. The cost/benefit analysis must start with the observation that regular season NFL football is superior to preseason NFL football. Therefore, replacing one game of the latter with one of the former must be good unless there is some particular reason to think otherwise. What might that reason (or reasons) be? ...

Will the British army be responsible for covering the inevitable eventual withdrawal of US troops? One retired British officer thinks so: “We’ll be the last men out”, he said. “We hold the country that the Americans will have to pull out through; and it will be our job to cover their retreat.” As convinced I am that it’s time for the US (and British) occupation of Iraq to end, the actual mechanics of a withdrawal are awful to contemplate. ...

If you don’t like to fly, you’ll probably want to skip this video of an evacuation test for the Airbus A380, where 873 people try to leave the plane as quickly as possible in total darkness.

Mike Shaver comments on the recent spate of tool announcements that seek to lure developers to abandon open Web technologies in favor of proprietary platforms. As he notes, these platforms are about selling tools. He dismisses that with a wave: I don’t think you should need to buy, or even use-for-free, any given tool to build the web, and by using and helping to drive open web technologies Mozilla lets people choose the tools they want to use. ...

If there’s one blog post you should read about the Paul Wolfowitz scandal at the World Bank, it’s this one from Brad DeLong. I thought I had been following the scandal closely and I still learned four or five things from it. I don’t think it’s unfair to Wolfowitz or to his critics. The short answer: resignation is the proper course for Wolfowitz.

We hear a lot of bad news from Iraq, but the refugee crisis actually seems underreported. Fred Clark posts on the latest count of displaced Iraqis, along with the news that well-known Iraqi blogger Riverbend and her family have decided to leave Iraq. Their destination remains unknown. They’re going to try to head to Syria or Jordan en route to somewhere that isn’t already full of Iraqi refugees. America will probably not be her ultimate destination, as the US has issued only 466 visas to Iraqis to Iraqis since the invasion. ...

Eric Burke illustrates why JavaFX doesn’t look like it will successfully compete with Microsoft’s Silverlight or Adoble Flash (and Flex). Good thing Java works well on the server, because it seems like Sun is as hamstrung as ever when it comes to interesting client software.

How little can you spend on food and still enjoy a healthy, well-balanced diet? Rebecca Blood is running a month-long experiment to find out.

Peter King from Sports Illustrated, quoted, as they say, for truth: I want to say this with all due respect, because I’m an animal lover. But I wish there would be as much hand-wringing over the 3,376 American fatalities in Iraq than there is over the death of Barbaro.

I saw a pointer earlier to these poll results from Rasmussen: Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure. Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view. ...