Regarding that story from 1954
Via Planet Debian, I saw John Goerzen's post about a supposed Popular Mechanics story from 1954 that describes the computer of the future, including a fabulous Fortran interface.

A colleague had sent that around a few weeks ago. And when I passed it on to John Eaton (of Octave fame), he quickly replied

That's pretty funny, but a google search for

popular mechanics 2004 home computer

turned up this link:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

So it's a hoax, after all.

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Tradesports down ... and up
Following the election polls and bets had become a recurrent habit over the last few weeks. Below is the current intraday chart from Tradesports / InTrade taken a few minutes ago during this election night, courtesy of the Bloomberg terminal and using symbol 'IPREBUSH INDEX'.

It shows the wild swing in the traded price of the 'Bush elected' contract over this afternoon and evening ... up to the point when all prices went to 1.0, and back up just moments ago. Was that a denial of service attack? Server overload? Operator error?

/computers/www/misc | permanent link

About PolicitalCompass.org
Jordi's post on planet debian lead me to politicalcompass.org, which is good fun for a few minutes.

And silly at the same time -- as it is about quantifying the arguably rather multidimensional aspects of, gasp, several social sciences discplines onto a two-dimensional plane (spanned by the, as far as the site goes, outdated 'left / right' metric, applied to an Economics axis, as well as polital liberalism vs authoritarian axis). Given that I was nerdy enough to endure schooling all the way to a doctoral degree in quantitative methods in social sciences (Econometrics, if you cared to ask), I have quite some empathy for the undertaking (as I also care a lot about empirical work if and when it is done well), as well as countless objections. But then again, we just did that mostly for the fun of it, didn't we?

And no, I'm not going to say how I scored on these two dimensions of 'economic left/right' and 'authoritarian / libertarian'. But if I told you that I've read the Economist for close to two decades, you'd get an idea.

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