The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

An excellent and very even-handed discussion by Orin Hargraves of the censorship of the word 'nigger' in The Adventures of Hucklebe...

Article headline: " Prime Minister Julia Gillard has launched the new Holden Cruze ". Honestly, what the hell is the Australian ...

I submit the following: 'Barty'. 'Zarty' 'Zub' 'Trub'. What am I getting at? Musicians are lazy . T...

In the US, today marks the end of Black History Month, also known as 'February'. Perhaps because I'm a foreigner (and hence ha...

Oh, the tasty Schadenfreude. San Francisco provides a subsidy for  low-flow toilets . San Francisco gets huge stench from low flow toile...

From the otherwise enjoyable Van Halen's song "Why can't this be love": "Only time can tell if we'll stand the ...

Apple has decided that attachments I download on my phone should be inaccessible to me. If I'm not connected to the Internet, I can'...

Perhaps I'm the only one who thinks this, but I always find it incredibly boorish when people post political status updates on Facebook....

Further on Libya, Businessweek reports that Switzerland has decided to freeze the assets of Gaddafi and his cronies for 3 years: Switzerla...

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, two esteemed MIT economists, have a new website examining their work on poverty. The website is called &#...

Let me a describe a situation that long characterised my music listening, and see if it applies to you. The bands I like always had one grea...

From Zero Hedge: Has The Chairman Stopped Ordering Ink? Hewlett Packard Plummets After Hours On Major Downward Guidance Revision Comedy gold!

Every time a Republican state legislature threatens to pass legislation stripping public sector unions of their right to negotiate, they fle...

The best advice is often not the most eloquent. It's not necessarily the advice which most concisely summarises the tradeoffs to be made...

Not so much in the political sense, but in the limited sense of 'where would you go if you were a dictator fleeing the country?'. So...

There is one action that any airline can take that will ensure my loyalty for years. Not just mine, but I'm sure lots of other customers...

One of the great things about markets is when they expose the dumb and contradictory things that people believe. When it comes to relieving ...

From the excellent new song 'Bloodbuzz Ohio', by The National. To describe the process of compounding interest leading to a spiralin...

It's never nice to make light of people's deaths, but some stories just write themselves: Apparently when you work for California g...

Wayne Swan continues to be a dangerous embarrassment to Australia. The Labor Government tried to introduce a mining 'super profits tax...

So I spent the last few days going snowboarding. I had arranged to go for three days, and head back early afternoon on the 4th day, on a 2:3...

Count the number of colours they're wearing, excluding black and white. The higher the number (and the brighter the colour) the more ski...

I'd call this result a win for my prediction , except that I walked my initial estimate back a bit . Overall I'm going with a par...

What is it with lame new-age parents and their refusal to impose any discipline on their children? I was stuck on a plane with this couple...

It's an underappreciated fact in political discourse that often the most successful points are made by telling a lot of narrative, and a...

In 2010, a 15 storey hotel in China was erected in 6 days: In 1775, over the 9 months from April to December, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote ...

The answer is (or should be), "everyone". Roissy  links to the following amazing picture, which is a computer composite of the f...

Mama Holmes was in town this weekend, and we went for a long drive to a state park. Upon returning, my windscreen was totally filthy, in the...

One post from Egyptian blogger 'the Sandmonkey' is worth 6 hours of al jazeera, 2 days of the bbc, and a month of everything else. ...

...is always harder than you think. Always, always, always. This comes under the category of "lessons that people generally know are ...

OKCupid is is a dating website that ran what seemed to me to be an awesome business model - free signups, and supporting itself with revenue...

Ah, Conan! Truly the funniest man on TV.

... is the quality of art drawn in the foam at the top of your cup. This: is made by a barista who takes pride in what they do. In m...

Most people don't make public, verifiable predictions. Everyone is an expert after the fact, and they're sure that they knew what wa...