RIP Benoit Mandelbrot - father of fractal geometry. (via Boingboing)
(Source: youtube.com)
A useful graph in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Here’s hoping for more “Shaun of the Dead”, and less “Return of the Living Dead”. (via GraphJam)
I have a pretty strong constitution. Blood and guts, snakes and bugs, human suffering, ABBA - none of these things get to me. But when I saw this grotesque abortion of bureaucracy, I actually recoiled in horror.
This unholy clusterfuck of a powerpoint slide is the “process” the military uses for choosing new equipment. Is it any wonder we end up pissing away more than half our federal budget on the armed forces and still can’t manage to beat a couple hundred jackasses living in caves?
That chart isn’t just unnecessarily convoluted, it’s deliberately convoluted. The only way a process gets to that point is if you’re trying to waste as much resources as possible while accomplishing as little possible. I shudder to think of the man-hours (not to mention tax dollars) spent on just coming up with the process, let alone the hundreds (thousands?) of paper-pushers required to actually follow it for every single piece of equipment used by the military. And this is just one small aspect of the massive armed forces bureaucracy. Can you imagine the process for the rest of it?
All 50 states, ranked by religiousness, along with other statistics. Now we all know that correlation does not equal causation, but damn. (via Digg)
One jackass sticks an M80s worth of low-grade explosives in his underpants, and everybody loses their shit about the horrible threat of terrorism. Then the TSA ups the overreaction ante by enacting rules so infuriatingly pointless that even the recently exhumed and reanimated corpse of Niccolò Machiavelli suggested “They may be taking this whole ineffective bureaucracy thing a bit too far”.
Thankfully, someone who isn’t a complete fuckwit decided to crunch the numbers and see what sort of threat terrorism actually poses. The answer is, of course, almost none. Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack are so infinitesimally small, you would need to fly to the moon and back twenty four thousand times before you were likely to see someone blow up their own crotch in the name of Allah.
So here we are, pissing away half a trillion dollars a year on “homeland security”, while the actual risk posed by terrorism practically zero. Meanwhile, when the first guy in 8 years actually does try to sneak a bomb onto a plane, none of the security theater at the airports manages to catch him until after he detonates his skivvies.
Man, those two unnecessary wars may have been expensive, and we may have lost the good faith of the world by torturing and killing people for no particular reason, and sure, we’ve given up most of our constitutional rights for the illusion of security, but at least the system works, right?
For fuck’s sake.
(infographic via Gizmodo, but you can’t blame them for the rant)
This lovely infographic from Susanna Hertrich’s Reality Checking Device illustrates the nearly-perfect inverse relationship between how dangerous something is, and how big a fuss the media makes about it. Gotta love that “infotainment”. (via Information is Beautiful)
Memes have a short lifespan. They’re the coolest thing in the world for about a month, and then you’re so sick of them you want to kill the entire internet for not dropping it already.
The song chart meme is the exception to the rule. This will never stop being awesome.
I haven’t seen the film yet (likely won’t until it is available from the Usual Sources), but having read the comics, I suspected this would be a hotly debated issue. (via Digg)
