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CNN.com: Riled about rail: Why all the anger over high speed trains?

Much of the opposition to rail projects appears to stem not from economic arguments, but from fundamental cultural values on what “American” transportation should be.

A perusal of online commentaries about passenger rail stories reveals a curious linkage by writers between passenger rail and “European socialism.”

For some reason, the American public doesn’t understand that if passenger rail is socialism, then so is having roads.

SI.com: Brewers’ new approach may shift opinions about defensive strategy

But thanks to information in spray charts that indicate where a batter is likely to hit a ground ball, the Brewers are taking infield shifts to a different level, sometimes to the extreme. For example, the Brewers’ infield shifted against the Nationals’ right-handed batters Jayson Werth, Michael Morse, rookie catcher Wilson Ramos and Rick Ankiel, a lefty.

I think that this is not likely to work.  Spray charts are charted balls in play with the defense in a traditional position.  The spray chart is most likely to change against a different defensive alignment.

Once an extreme visible shift is made, most good players should be able to hit the ball the other way to take advantage of an opportunity.

CNN.com: Whoops! Stamp features Vegas babe, not New York lady

The U.S. Postal Service on Friday confirmed that the image was of the statue at the New York-New York Hotel & Casino, a fact that was made known to them by a stamp collector a few weeks ago.

But, attempting to make the best of an embarrassing situation, the Postal Service said it would have picked the image anyway, and it said news of the mistake has added enthusiasm to the stamp-loving masses.

I don’t believe for a second that they would have used this image if they had known.  If you look at the windows on the crown, they’re clearly painted in.

CNN.com: China bans time travel for television

New guidelines issued on March 31 discourage plot lines that contain elements of “fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and a lack of positive thinking.”

time travel = bad
flying kung fu fighters = good

Banning all this pretty much a ban against all science fiction.

bldgrefuge.com: Vhils in residence at the BLDG

Vhils’ work looks great.  I’m definitely going to head down to the BLDG this Friday (4/15/11 7-11pm) to check his work out.

NYTimes.com: Is Sugar Toxic?

If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the
primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have
skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than
that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely
dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be
diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many
common cancers among them.

Fascinating article.  It’ll make you think twice about adding that sugar to your coffee.

My girlfriend sent me a link to this video by the Japanese group World Order of their song Mind Shift.

I ended up spending a good chunk of the evening watching this and their other videos. The precision choreography is amazing as is their editing of their videos. And the song Mind Shift is starting to grow on me after listening to it over and over.
The lead singer in this group is kind of a renaissance man. Genki Sudo is a former professional MMA fighter, author, musician, and actor.

It’s an interesting play on the Western perception of Japanese businessmen as automatons. 

I’ve embedded four videos, all similar but different. Definitely worth a look.

An amazingly artistic video.  I remember when I saw the Aha “Take on Me” video when I was kid and it blew my mind.  That’s a Model T compared to this.

via ShawnBlanc.net

sethgodin.typepad.com: Insist on the coin flip

This is also the way we should settle closely contested elections. We know the error rate for counting ballots is some percentage–say it’s .01%. Whenever the margin is less than the error rate, we should flip. Not waste months and millions in court, we should insist on the flip. Anything else is a waste of time and money.

If our process of collecting ballots and counting them continues to be an error filled process, a flip of a coin in really tight elections seems like a better solution than the expense of recounting it.   

MotherJones.com: Huckabee Hearts Secrecy

Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid.
…
A former high-ranking Arkansas Republican who was once close to Huckabee and who requested anonymity told Mother Jones that the destruction of the hard drives puzzled him. “I don’t know what that was about, if they had things to hide or not,” he says. But, he adds, the episode fits with Huckabee’s general reticence when it comes to public disclosure. “Huckabee just absolutely doesn’t trust anybody. In my experience, if you don’t trust people, it’s because you’re not trustworthy. We see the world through our own eyes.”