Nathan Young

"Neither of them is perfect, but if you, out of nowhere, are going to grab a woman out of the woods and make her your vice presidential candidate, what can I do? [Sarah Palin] is like Jodie Foster in the movie 'Nell,' " Stewart continued. "They just found her, and she was speaking her own special language." - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

"The stupids are a complex demographic of paste eaters, nitwits and numbskulls. Personal attacks are the issues that affect them, and they will be determining the election." - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

"The set wrapped up with something that has almost become a Byrne tradition in San Francisco: an appearance by the Extra Action Marching Band. The band descended through the crowd-filled aisles for about 10 minutes of marching band jam-time, followed by a full-band version of "Burning Down The House" with all the house lights on." - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

DB was incredible and the finale was awesome. I only wish that I had been able to make both of the shows in SF. - Nathan Young

"For those voters whose minds were long ago made up, and see stark differences between the candidates, undecided voters seem a curious lot. Often it seems they are not waiting to hear the candidates weigh in on a particular issue, or feel torn over any particular point. They often can’t say anything particularly warm or scathing about either man, and can name no revelation they seek. It is almost as if they are standing before two suitcases, one empty and one full of cash, and just fear desperately they will make the wrong choice." - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

"Get clear facts about Barack Obama and Joe Biden's plan for essential issues facing Americans." This one is great... it seems like it'd be really good for when you need to pull up his policy on something or if you need to dispute a misconception. Useful for when canvassing ;) - Ana via Bookmarklet

That's a really smart idea. Too bad, it's not available on my phone. Not that I need it; most info is in my head and most people I run into are pro-Obama. - Faboo Mama

Does Ana have an iPhone yet? - Jason

We hadn't talked in over 10 years. But this was the email he sent me out of the blue: "Dear Ana, apologies upfront for this no doubt random seeming email from a long ago (and perhaps long forgotten) friend, but I was reading up on an interesting new webtool, and as I was checking the company info, there you were. The randomness of this event inspired me to look you up and send this quick note. I realize it's been eons, but If you have the time/interest I'd love to hear back from you and reconnect. I've never felt there should be a statute of limitation on such things, and I hope you feel the same!" - Ana

Yes, thank you FF! You'll always have a special place in my heart for helping us to reconnect. Rediscovering our friendship after so long was definitely one of the best things to happen to me all year! - Nathan Young

Hello, fellow Hoosiers :) Or were you just visiting? - Kamilah Gill

"“We just saw a big ship,” the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, told The New York Times. “So we stopped it.” He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood." - Ana via Bookmarklet

“Killing is not in our plans,” he said. “We only want money, so we can protect ourselves from hunger.” When asked why the pirates needed $20 million to protect themselves from hunger, Mr. Sugule laughed over the phone and said: “Because we have a lot of men.” - Sanjeev Singh

Seriously, this is the funniest thing I've read all day. "He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”" - torque

Loved Zhang Yimou's production "Impressions of Sanjie" on the Li River in Yangshuo, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does on a much bigger scale. Will be watching tonight on HDTV with friends and eating Chinese takeout! - Nathan Young

Maybe in an SF MOMA exhibit. - Ontario Emperor via fftogo

amazingly beautiful... - Pokai

"A grueling survey of vast tracts of forest and swamp in the northern Congo Republic has revealed the presence of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas, a rare example of abundance in a world of rapidly vanishing primate populations." - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

more, please! - j1m

"It's time for a new New Deal - one that invests more money, more wisely. It is as impossible to imagine America without FDR's New Deal as it is to imagine the country without Eisenhower's interstate highway system. Those massive public investments epitomized both the vision and courage that are desperately lacking in today's Washington." - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

Like the cartoon - j1m

My plan has backfired of course. In my friend's words: "if death in Beijing is a real possibility, maybe I don't want to get too attached to you before you leave. :-)" - Ana

Heh, I just got an email like yours because I'm so deep into email bankruptcy. I bias my life so that I do email last in the day, and that almost always means i don't answer a lot of my email. I'm not going to be a slave to the inbox. I refuse. Instead I'll be a slave to Twitter and FriendFeed. :-) - Robert Scoble

A better carrot/stick would have been, if I don't see you before I go, I won't remember to bring you back a wacky souvenir, like a chocolate snack cake where the slogan promises: "This tastiness cannot be carried, even with both hands." (Scoble, I'll have to find an extra-wacky souvenir for you :) - Ana

"Working out is tough. So why not skip the exercise and pop a few endurance-boosting pills? That dream, cherished by millions of sedentary couch potatoes, just got a little bit closer. Today, researchers are reporting that an experimental drug can mimic the results of an exercise regimen -- with no exercise required. After four weeks of taking the pill, mice who hadn't worked out displayed a 44 percent increase in their running endurance." - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

"Al Gore—or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al—placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity's hubristic folly. "There is nothing left now but to ensure that my infant son does not meet the same fate as the rest of my doomed race," Gore said. "I will send him to a new planet, where he will, I hope, be raised by simple but kindly country folk and grow up to be a hero and protector to his adopted home."" - Dan Hsiao

This was too good. Had to reshare from a private feed. - Dan Hsiao

Al looks good in silver. - C. Golis

"No one knows for sure why deaths are more common during the swim portion of triathlons, but researchers have some intriguing theories. Public accounts of this year’s fatalities indicate that the athletes seemed outwardly healthy, and autopsies turned up no obvious cause of death, such as blocked arteries. The combination of apparent good health and a negative autopsy suggests a fatality caused by abnormal heart rhythms, said Pamela Douglas, a Duke University cardiologist who has studied triathletes. Evidence suggests that swimming may trigger a certain type of cardiac arrhythmia caused by a genetic condition called long QT syndrome, said Michael Ackerman, a cardiologist and the director of the Windland Smith Rice Sudden Death Genomics Laboratory at the Mayo Clinic. About 1 in 2,000 people are born with a heart condition that causes a glitch in the heart’s electrical system, and the most common of these is called long QT syndrome, after the tell-tale interval on an electrocardiogram." - Ana via Bookmarklet

it's a good thing i dont know how to swim! no danger of dying while competing in a triathalon! - eviltom

Sacca: good luck on your ironman!!! You're my triathlete dream.. (olympic distance wimp) - Erin

I am really impressed by his concise and to-the-point summary of what most of the media reports have patently missed and/or glossed over. I would love to hear what Faust (Harvard's current president) thinks of these findings. - Ana

Maybe I'm just bad at math (or at least statistics), but I fail to see the point this post makes. We are unable to norm for differences in how boys and girls are raised, so I am skeptical of the idea that you can just point to math test scores as a way to determine (or even estimate) biologically differences in math ability. - C. Golis

From p.253 of this article addressing the issue of differences in achievement and that males show greater variance in standardized test scores (http://www.pitt.edu/~bertsch/w...). He makes the argument that this effect could be at least partly attributable to some mental traits lying on the X chromosome, and since males only have one copy of any X-linked gene, one might predict that they should exhibit greater variance in those traits they affect. Male variability would not be a product of what they have that females don't, but rather, what males lack (i.e., a genetic mechanism for buffering against variability). The whole article is actually worth reading because it focuses on how the concept of variance is generally underappreciated, often to ill effect. - Nathan Young

STP did a Lou Reed/Obama mashup in the middle, and played an illegal second encore they claimed would cost them $20k in fines. - Casey Muller

Or $2.50 per person at the show. Only off by a factor of 2 ;) - Nathan Young

"India has always had its upper classes, as well as legions of the world’s very poor. But today a landscape dotted with Hamilton Courts, pressed up against the slums that serve them, has underscored more than ever the stark gulf between those worlds, raising uncomfortable questions for a democratically elected government about whether India can enable all its citizens to scale the golden ladders of the new economy." The pictures bring to mind the beginnings of a Margaret Atwood novel. - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

This is making me so hungry! Must mean it's time to go back home for a visit. The review of Mr. B's, one of my favorites, at: http://blog.nola.com/brettande... - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet

Hope you feel better. - Aaron Myers

Sorry.. hope you feel better... - Chad

and this *illness* has nothing to do with your car troubles... right? :) - Jeanette Martinez

"On MySpace, Obama lists more than 401,000 friends to McCain's nearly 56,000. A similar sevenfold gap exists on Facebook, where Obama supporters number 1,040,185 while McCain's clock in at 152,570. And on YouTube, it's like Obama and McCain operate in two separate layers of the atmosphere. McCain's channel, which has posted 208 videos, has been viewed 3.7 million times; Obama's more than 1,100 videos on his channel have been viewed 53.4 million times." - Nathan Young via Bookmarklet