The Yorkshire Ranter

I mentioned earlier that the dollar and for that matter, the US public finances, were being supported by a huge accumulation of foreign reserves, and that this was a basically unstable situation that however could remain in place for an unknown length of time until “it” happened. This is technically known as metastability. It looks…

..and electoral results looks like this. Via Crooked Timber

The Washington Post reports on the use of monster databases to record customers who return or exchange goods they find unsatisfactory, and to refuse returns automatically to people a computer decides do it too often. This is just another example of a worrying trend – using industrial-strength data mining and surveillance systems for trivial purposes,…

Brad DeLong reports on a Federal Reserve research paper by Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard on the way world central banks have been building up foreign exchange reserves. Up to this year, the total holdings of foreign currency assets in central banks have almost doubled since 1995. Now, there are a couple of obvious market…

The Daily Kos is on the case again, and this time it’s Florida that is having fun with maths. It appears, with the first sets of actual numbers in, that more people cast votes for Presidential candidates than voted at all. Not just that, but there is a mysterious surge in Republican votes in counties…

Random Reality reports that thieves have stolen a decontamination vehicle from the London Ambulance Service, full of atropine sulphate syringes. As yer man points out, if they shoot that stuff up they could well die.

Amid all the excitement, of course, serious illness seized someone else’s president. Yasser Arafat collapsed in his Ramallah bunker and was, after some parley, transported to France for treatment. Something of the division this is likely to unleash was well pointed up by the political squabble that broke out over the question of whether or…

Back in 2000, I was astonished to hear of the odd, Heath Robinsonesque voting machines of chad infamy. Being British, I was used to a voting system based on three P’s – paper, pencil, public counting. I’ve never been very keen on e-voting for the simple reason that I don’t see a benefit that outweighs…

The Daily Kos reports a case of what you might call fuzzy electoral maths in Franklin County, Ohio. Franklin County, OH: Gahanna 1-B Precinct 638 TOTAL BALLOTS CAST US Senator: Fingerhut (D) – 167 votes Voinovich (R) – 300 votes US President: Kerry (D) – 260 votes Bush (R) – 4,258 votes Well, some people…

When Kevin MacDonald’s film version of the tale of Joe Simpson, the British climber who barely survived an accident on the summit of Siula Grande, appeared I clearly went to see it at once. Unfortunately, Blogger fell down in a pool of its own credibility when I posted a monster review of the flick, and…