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Whenever Jon Steward announces a segment from comedian Lewis Black on The Daily Show, he says, “When a news story falls through the cracks, our own Lewis Black catches it.” That would be my introduction to Eric Umansky’s weblog. Umansky has written Today’s Papers for Slate intermittently over the years, and does a fine job at it, but at his weblog, he picks up the obscure and telling stories that really illuminate what’s going on in the world. For example, last week he turned up this tidbit about John Bolton that deflates any argument that Bolton’s lack of respect for the United Nations somehow positions him to be an effective reformer. Bolton’s biggest problem with the United Nations is his belief that the United States should not accept any limits on its sovereignty. Given that he believes that, there is no place for the United Nations or any other international organization where membership involves trading in some of a country’s sovereignty in exchange for influence in the affairs of other countries. Anyway, without Umansky’s sleuthing, I wouldn’t have known that. ...

Back in the pre-Web days, heck, in the pre-WYSIWYG word processing days, a common way to make big type was the Unix banner program (here’s a link to the man page). In these days of HTML, HTML email, and Microsoft Word, the banner program has fallen into disuse, a relic of the moldy ASCII past. Imagine my surprise when I saw it repurposed by spammers. Over the past few days I’ve gotten a lot of spam with a message body like this: ...

Max Sawicky wrote a sane and reasonable defense of the federal income tax to mark the date.

At least some employees of Microsoft are bitter, bitter, bitter right now. And to think that I always thought of Microsoft as an idyllic place to work, even if I didn’t want to work there.

Seems like the “peak oil” theory is getting lots of attention these days, primarily because professional pessimist and curmudgeon James Kunstler has been talking about it for what seems like forever. Anyway, Rolling Stone published his thoughts on the subject, and over at BoingBoing they’ve been doing a good job of aggregating the reaction. The idea of there being a point at which the daily demand for oil outstrips the amount the world can produce makes sense to me. I have no idea when we’ll reach that point, but it certainly seems inevitable. At the same time, I’m less confident in the dates that people or tossing around or in the effects that are being predicted. History is not on the side of people who have predicted the dire global consequences of pretty much anything. Update: Rebecca Blood writes to inform me that Peak Oil refers to a peak in oil production capacity, the point at which ew can no longer increase the number of barrels of oil drilled per day. Obviously if that point does exist, and demand continues to increase, then we run into an undersupply and oil prices will increase more rapidly. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a detailed page explaining the theory. Another update: John Scalzi bets on American ingenuity. I’d call it human adaptability, but I agree with him in the general case. We humans persevere. Stan Taylor points out that Scalzi’s probable scenario isn’t particularly rosy. ...

Ed Felten has a post on the lack of reasoning behind adding an RFID chip to our passports. Adam Shostack has some additional comments as well.

Bruce Schneier went through the intellectual exercise of analyzing the security of the papal election procedures. His take is that it would be very hard to commit fraud, but the details of the analysis are really what’s interesting.

Sam Ruby has an essay on continuations that will make you smarter. This essay is complement to the other essay on continuations that I linked to awhile back. When I read essays like these, I wish I had gutted it out and majored in computer science.

James Suroweicki has a good article on the falling dollar and what it means for the US economy. You can read about this stuff in The Economist every week.

Adrian Holovaty insightfully points out that Greasemonkey is good for publishers because nearly all Greasemonkey scripts demonstrate how a Web site can be improved. Only a small minority of users will ever install Greasemonkey, but publishers can look at the scripts and figure out how to make their sites better for all of their users. In some ways, Greasemonkey is sort of an offshoot of the idea of user interface mods for computer games. When companies make the interfaces of their games modifiable, most of the improvements to the user interface arrive courtesy of community-built enhancements, and in many cases those enhancements get rolled back into the default interface so that all users can benefit from them. The idea that this can be accomplished with Web sites is somewhat revolutionary. ...