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Tired: bushfish.com Wired: kerryfish.com

John Tierney wrote a somewhat unintersting column for the New York Times suggesting that suicide bombings should not be reported by the media, and that the reason that we do report them is to satisfy people’s base interest in carnage. That column has provoked a number of interesting responses. Bruce Schneier’s disassembly of the argument is a must read. Scott Rosenberg takes on the argument as it is presented. My favorite response, though, is Eric Umansky’s note that on the same day Tierney’s column arguing against the excessive coverage of suicide bombings was published, the three suicide bombings from the previous day in Iraq got a one sentence mention in the New York Times and were not mentioned in the other major papers at all. ...

Cool idea of the day – running GreaseMonkey scripts on a proxy. Sure seems like the idea that users will view your content exactly as you had intended continues to recede further into the distance.

Important note to all columnists, bloggers, and other online pundits: never again start a missive with some variation of “I’m sure my inbox is filling up with flames right now.” It’s not an original, enlightening, or witty way to announce that you’re about to say something “controversial.” If you have something to say, just say it.

United Airlines was allowed by a bankruptcy judge to default on its pensions. Taxpayers will be picking up the slack, but some beneficiaries will see their benefits decline sharply. What does it mean? Alex Tabarrok says this is a warning to people who don’t want to replace Social Security with private accounts. Josh Marshall’s readers point out that this is exactly why Social Security must be preserved. Update: To be correct, pensions in default are covered by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. So taxpayers won’t make up the difference to pay for these pensions in default, rather the other pension programs that participate in the PBGC will pay higher fees to cover the defaulters. Obviously, though, if enough pensions default that’s not sustainable. (For example, see what happened to the FSLIC in the S & L scandal in the eighties.) ...

Joel Spolsky: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. Includes an explanation and defense of Hungarian notation (as it’s meant to be used).

Ed Felten explains why the Newsweek rankings of high schools are totally bogus. The problem seems to be that they used the numbers available without thinking about whether those numbers have any explanatory value.

A doctor who happens to consult for the liquor industry says that if red wine is good for you, Scotch whisky is even better. The more pedestrian truth is that you can get even more of the stuff that’s good for you by eating soft fruit.

Havoc Pennington on IDEs, after giving Eclipse a whirl: The most important language features are the ones that enable a great IDE. I do all my Java hacking in Eclipse (and have no doubt that I could be similarly productive in Netbeans or IntelliJ IDEA if I used them every day), and I do my other coding in VIM. When people compare the overall level of productivity in Java to certain scripting languages, I think they often fail to take into account the IDE factor. Between the fact that the IDE simply does a lot of typing for me, and builds a symantic model of the code that enables me to transform it in many ways with little effort, the greater overhead imposed by Java’s syntax melts away. Update: the subject of the post above is not Java, per se, but language politics regarding the GNOME desktop for Linux. Miguel de Icaza has a post about that as well. I don’t even use GNOME or follow Linux politics these days, so I have no idea what they’re talking about. ...

I have come to believe that one of the simplest things the United States could do to improve the quality of our government is change the way Congressional districts are drawn. Mark Schmitt covers some redistricting schemes that would create more competitive Congressional races and hopefully give us a more responsive Congress with fewer safe incumbents.