Found a really great article from gladwell.com: U.S. versus U.K.:

“The first conclusion is that Americans are really, really sick compared to the British. In every socio-economic group, for instance, the prevalence of diabetes is roughly double in the United States than it is in the United Kingdom. Rates of hypertension, heart disease, heart attacks, stroke, lung disease and cancer are also all higher in the United States. And not just a little big higher. Much higher. So, for example, 2.3 percent of the English have had a stroke, versus 3.8 percent of the Americans.”

It appears that this study appears to have better controls on self reporting and the greater diversity of the US than previous studies did. ‘Least that’s what I gleaned from the comments. This comment about different work practices between the UK and the US rang particularly true for me.

I’ve ordered a dvd burner from Newegg.com. They send me an email letting me know the burner is shipping. Great! now I take the UPS tracking number (1Z5AE6660347303603 ) and slap it into a field on isnoop’s feed generator, then subscribe to the feed in bloglines.
Now I’ll know every step my burner takes on the way to my doorstep. Here’s the tracking feed.

Allergy Test Results,
originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

Check out these huge blotches on my arm. I am very allergic to trees and grass.

That’s it, I’m moving back to the upper east side. Also, check out this cool new contraption from Duane Reade I discovered at my allergists’ place.

bklyn backyard panorama,
originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

Tried out the panorama on my cameraphone and it came out pretty decent. In case you wanted to see what my backyard is like at the moment.

This got me thinking: I wish there was a list somewhere of those rss readers that implement http’s conditional get. It’s really important to the development of RSS for clients to play nice with server’s rss feeds. Conditional get is a way for people to play nice by asking servers: “Should I even bother checking this feed?” and servers can say: “Nothing’s changed, see you in a bit.”

This lowers bandwidth for everyone, and makes it cheaper for people to provide handy dandy services like the Unofficial podcast for This American Life or The unofficial Exploding Dog Feed.

So say you want to be a good community member and use a reader that supports conditional GET. Where do you find out who supports it?

Just kidding. But I just noticed on Statemaster’s profile of SC that SC leads the U.S. in aggravated assaults and violent crimes per capita. Sounds like someone needs to get even way more ultra-mega-tough-on-crime!

I don’t know which makes me like this story more, my corporate job or my love of the zombie novels.

Working Stiff, at Masochuticon:

“It was a matter of some pride to John Parr that he had never taken a sick day in his life; the sudden and violent cessation of life did not seem in itself a convincing reason to shirk. In many ways, he might have thought, if most of his cerebral matter was not currently sitting in the oesophagus and gullet of a former loss adjuster (himself now sitting, due to an absence of working knees, in the gutter of Threadneedle Street), becoming a zombie was precisely the kind of radical change that employees often need if they are to resist staleness. There might even be advantages. Discounting for a moment the constant, instinctual yearning for brains, the undead did not appear to need food, and as such the tendency to dawdle over lunch could be excised from a workforce. Also, since zombies were by any legal standard as dead as… well, as dead as John Parr himself, it was reasonable to suppose that much of the workplace legislation that had recently caused so many problems in some of Price and Partners’ more production-oriented holdings could be open to challenge as discriminatory against the deceased.”

I hope you like it too. By the way, you can be notified of every maschuticon story by email or subscribe to their RSS feed.

I’ve been raging on and on about how much I wanted a projector for ages. It seems like the perfect new york device. You put it up in the air, it puts the image where you point it. When I moved into my current apartment in Brooklyn I saw the backyard with a bare wall at the end and knew my projectorless days were numbered. They were probably numbered around at around 150 or so, because yesterday I picked up a Proxima Projectors: Proxima DP9280 PolySi LCD projector for only 200 bucks!

First, a few words about buying it. Do your research, because there are lots of terrible deals out there among the few good deals.

Resolution
Your standard TV resolution is 800X600. You may find projectors available at lower resolutions than that fairly cheap, but they will not look as good as your basic TV. If all you will ever be projecting is basic tv and movies, 800X600 is all you need. If you are planning on projecting your computer screen or HD content, 1024X768 is minimal and higher resolutions are better(but more costly).

Brightness
The brighter the better. Honestly. The way a normal TV works is that there are little bits of the screen shooting light out directly at your eyes. This is why you can watch tv with the lights off, but you can’t read with the lights off. A projector throws light at some flat reflective surface and the light bounces back at you. An awful lot doesn’t make the trip back to your eyes, so a projector is generally dimmer than a regular TV.
For projectors, the brightness is measured in Lumens. You definitely need to try any projector, ESPECIALLY A USED ONE, before you buy. That way you can see how bright it really is and what environments you can use it in. My projector is rated for 3000 ANSI lumens, and looks it. You can play it with all the lights on, no problem. Yes, that means it also uses a ton of energy and is hot like a furnace. Everything is a tradeoff.

Craigslist
This is how I looked for my projector. I went to to craigslist and put in a search for “projector”. Every single search on Craigslist has an RSS feed. Hell, every page on craigslist has an rss feed. That’s because you can get an rss feed just by appending “&format=rss” to any url in CL to get it back as an rss feed. So use that! Subscribe to your search in your favorite aggregator and check it daily. When you see something that looks like a good deal, email the people and set up a time to look at the merchandise. My projector was so cheap because I waited around until a company was replacing their projectors with the latest models. They asked the secretary to get rid of the old ones and she put up these $12,000 projectors for $200 apiece. Hot dog!

Tomorrow I’ll try to put up some photos of the picture quality in various conditions. The projector is huge, hot, and totally awesome. Last night I played tekken5 on a 60″ picture. I’m so psyched for the first warm nights and movies in the backyard.

This flash game is cool! Start it up, then try clicking off the U.S.A button. The map is pretty inactive. Then click on the U.S.A. button. The game goes crazy!!
Via boingboing

Jack Chick Comic turned into a lesson about argument ad baculum

Oh, that’s hot.