Akkam’s Razor

• PixoPoint | Specialists in the design, coding and implementation of websites -
• Hitler Emoticons [PIC] - Too soon.
• Teaching Online Journalism » What we now know about blogs -
• robcurley.com » The Five Ps - The 5P's, but for the internet…
• Business Dynamics Statistics - Home - The new Business Dynamics Statistics are a product of the Center for Economic Studies of the U.S. Census Bureau. The annual series describes establishment-level business dynamics along dimensions absent from similar databases including firm age and firm size. The new data series provides researchers with a tool to gain insight into the dynamics of a changing economy.

• http://benfry.com/allstreets/ - This visualization by Ben Fry depicts all of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. Alaska and Hawaii were initially left out for simplicity's sake, but then Ben Fry felt guilty because of the sad emails he received. However, he made the final decision of leaving them out permanently because the two states didn't "work", since there aren't enough roads to outline their shape.

The more we hear about the non-vetting of Sarah Palin, the more desperate the McCain camp appears. Here’s my take on what happened.

McCain would have preferred Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman. The “enthusiasm gap” - the lack of excitement and engagement of Evangelicals threatens to subdue turnout, guaranteeing a McCain loss - made neither of those choices palpable. Ridge was wholly unacceptable to “the base” due to his being pro-choice. Lieberman, however, was clearly the pick of the Neocons; his choice would likely cause Rush Limbaugh to relapse. A pick of Lieberman would essentially cede domestic policy back to the Democrats.

There's a couple of great tables over at Congressional Quarterly that provide you with the results of 35 Roll Call votes, and demonstrate via scores for 2006 and 2005 the unity between that Representative or Congressman and President Bush.  There's some other data that can be gleaned as well. 

The second Curt Weldon mailer that I received is a pure “Swift Boat” attack piece on Retired Navy Admiral Joe Sestak.  Again, as you might recall, Weldon had avoided service during the Vietnam War, despite having a low draft number.  Subsequent explanations from the Weldon camp, have been inconsistent at best, with his initially claiming that he received a college deferment, and then later that he received a medical deferment for poor eyesight.  There has never been a clear answer given as to whether either of these is accurate.