Elsewhere on the Interweb (9/6/07)

Beer pong is now industrial:

These guys aren't exactly Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But Messrs. Wright and Johnson, both 22 years old, are part of a new wave of young people trying to make money tapping into their peers' devotion to beer pong, a cross between ping-pong and beer chugging. As beer-pong season hits a peak with the start of the school year, these beer-pong entrepreneurs are running tournaments and peddling customized beer-pong tables, balls and apparel.

In 2004, brothers Ben and Jesse Spiegel took a leave from the University of Denver, pooled more than $50,000 in savings and borrowed money, and started BJ's Beer Pong. Following a business plan he wrote after taking a business course, Jesse spent seven months traveling around China looking for a factory to produce their portable beer-proof, sun-resistant tables with built-in rubber mats.

They say they have sold about 8,000 tables for prices ranging from $110 to $250 and have registered domain names in Australia, England and Ireland with hopes of international expansion. "By reading a lot of business and success books, we knew we could work hard and will it to happen," Jesse says.

(That is, incidentally, a picture of me playing the...um...sport.)

Patient gender is a factor in diagnosing heart disease risk:

The key finding in the research was how the doctors approached the issue of patient age. Increasing age is known to be an important risk factor for CHD amongst both men and women. However many of the doctors in the study showed a clear bias in favour of male patients when considering age as a diagnostic factor. This bias was even more pronounced amongst female doctors.

When considering the accounts of all the doctors in the study, the researchers found that 81% of doctors said they took note of age as a diagnostic factor for the male video patients they saw, but only mentioned it as a diagnostic factor for 63% of the female patients. Amongst female doctors the difference was more pronounced, as they reported age as an issue in 91% of the male patients they saw but only in 50% of the females. These differences may account for greater uncertainty about the diagnosis of CHD for women patients. (Emphasis mine.)

The Federal Election Commission will not regulate political blogging as political advertising (Hat-tip: Slashdot):

"While the complaint asserts that DailyKos advocates for the election of Democrats for federal office, the commission has repeatedly stated that an entity that would otherwise qualify for the media exemption does not lose its eligibility because it features news or commentary lacking objectivity or expressly advocates in its editorial the election or defeat of a federal candidate," the FEC said.

Services surpass farming world-wide as a larger portion of the economy (Hat-tip: Slashdot):

So, firstly, modernization of large ecnomies is largely bypassing industrialization and going straight for service industries - in our western economies the service sector was about two-thirds of the economy, and has grown further (to 71.2%). But the so large parts of the world economy are moving straight to service industries that their roles have changed. Worldwide, in 1996 agriculture employed 42%, industry 21%, and services 37%. In 2006, the numbers are 36%, 22%, and 42%. So in the period, services has overtaken farming on a global scale.

To me this stuck out as the news of the day. This is a tremendous milestone. In the west we're accustomed to the farming sector being 4-6% or so, but that certaintly not true in most of the word. You might think the industrial revolution was a long time ago, but the reality is that more people have continued to work in farming. Until sometime in these past few years that is.

Putin tries to revise history so that Stalin was just poorly understood:

Last year, the president informed a group of history teachers that Russia "has nothing to be ashamed of" and that it was their job to make students "proud of their motherland." His government has tried to help by commissioning guidelines and books that present a more balanced picture of Joseph Stalin, described in one approved volume as "the most successful Soviet leader ever."

...

To reach that conclusion, you have to excuse or forget the biggest events of Stalin's quarter-century rule, which left vast piles of corpses. His first notable "achievement" was trying to raise agricultural output by forcing millions of peasant farmers into collective farms--while wiping out supposedly prosperous farmers whom he condemned as vicious class enemies. In what a Marxist scholar later called "probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens," hordes of peasants were killed or sent to Siberia.

The new textbooks suggest that Stalin's methods, though harsh, served the important need of bringing about economic progress. But the collectivization drive brought on a famine that was one of the worst the world has ever seen.

Speaking of Stalin, here's Orwell, the blogosphere, and the integrity of the English language (Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan):

Now just in its second decade, the blogosphere is at once wonderful and horrible. For the global community, fumbling towards some common ground, the opportunity it affords for extraordinary cross-cultural interaction is liberating and unprecedented. The Baghdad Blogger is just one example of the blogosphere at its finest. For everyone to have a voice, in the most unpropitious circumstances, is the fulfilment of a dream.

Yet the democracy of the web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare. For every carefully crafted, thoughtful expression of opinion, there are a score of half-baked rants: ignorant, bilious, semi-literate and depressing.

...

There's another thing that Orwell the great freelance would have been quick to identify: in the blogosphere, no one gets properly paid; its irresponsibility is proportionate to its remoteness from the cash nexus. Worse, the blogosphere, to which all journalists are now professionally committed, not only challenges the old infrastructure of print, but it also sponsors a new prolixity.

From the Orwellian point of view, it is the violence the internet does to the English language as much as its challenge to the journalistic infrastructure that is the biggest anxiety. (Emphasis mine.)

Read the whole thing.