Seeing as Pirates of the Caribbean II is coming out soon, I wonder whether it’s too late to get Johnny Depp back into the studio for a gratuitous falling-out-of-a-palm-tree scene, as a hat-tip to his character’s inspiration. Seems like an obvious option (I mean, _I_ thought of it). Though seeing as Richards had post-accident brain surgery recently, maybe the studio doesn’t want to risk it.
The comments in “my recent post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/23/incarceration-rates/ about U.S. incarceration rates got a little bad tempered: some people (I’m looking at you, jet) didn’t like the figure, because it included countries that are not exactly model states. Some followup below the fold.
There are some exciting developments in the online map space these days. WikiMapia is a wiki approach to Google Maps that let’s you add notes and tags to maps all over. MapCruncher is a program that lets you draw maps on top of other maps (or something like that). I haven’t been able to try out the latter yet due to some of the requirements, but I’m hoping it’ll come together soon as it sounds very promising.
UPDATE: I finally got MapCruncher to work. It requires Windows XP and the .NET 2.0 runtime, which is not as obvious as the Web site makes it sound. Also, rendering the map (overlaying the north-side map of the Chicago El on Virtual Earth) took about 18 minutes, not the 5-10 the site suggests.
UPDATE2: Parts of WikiMapia are starting to get quite a bit of information. Here is the White House area.. not surprisingly with some fairly random commentary as well.
Right. Now take the survey under the fold. But only if your intuitions are untainted by first viewing the image at J&B. (We want to be scientistic about this.)
A “comment by Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2006/05/go-tell-norbiz-happy-fucking.html reminded me that this week I’ll have been blogging for four years. I’m not sure what to think about that, so let’s look at some data. Here is a time-series of the number of posts per month on “my blog”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog from its “inauspicious beginning”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/05/21/the-hello-world-entry/ in May 2002 to the present. (Since CT started, I’ve just posted the same material to my own blog, so the trend represents all my posts.)
*Update*: More trendline goodness added below.