this is why i blend in so well

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The South
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Northeast
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

UPDATE--my Dad called to say he was categorized as "Philadelphia", which is incredibly odd considering that he has lived something like 11/12 of his life in the state of Georgia, and the remainder in Texas and Germany.

This test might not be very scientific, is what I'm sayin'...

your sanctimonious thought for the day

If as many people would get as pissed off about cops killing innocent people in the name a futile drug war as they do about Kramer using the "N-word", we'd be well on our way to a much better world.

(And yes, a 92-year-old woman with no criminal history and no reasonable expectation of being raided by the police opening fire in self-defense upon masked men breaking into her home talking about drugs is "innocent" in every possible sense of the word.)

Radley Balko has compiled an excellent collection of "isolated incidents" here.

fax this

Ha!

"the entire world's stock of human capital has been diminished"

--so says Catallarchy, on the death of Milton Friedman.

Indeed.

larry summers, thou art avenged

Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates. However, family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection. Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.

Via Tyler Cowan. I have neither the time nor the expertise to read the paper critically (nor, frankly, the inclination) but it does seem to gel with a hell of a lot of anecdotal evidence.

It is amazing what you can find when you ask an honest question and make every attempt to be unencumbered by the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. Almost like, well...science...

UPDATE--Permalinks to Marginal Revolution are acting odd. Go to the front page and scroll down to "Politically Incorrect Paper of the Month.

some balls were meant to be dropped

OK--back to what matters.

M took me to the Tech-Carolina game today for my birthday present (it's not for another week, but no one asked me when they made the football schedule.)

It was great to see a win, but I have to say that as wins go, it felt pretty hollow. Like I imagine besting a senior citizen at arm wrestling might feel. Or perhaps beating a one-legged man in a footrace.

It's nothing to brag about, is what I'm saying.

I can't express in words how happy I am that next year our QB will someone--anyone--other than Reggie "Huck the" Ball. Seriously. That kid is overthrowing at the end of his senior season every bit as bad as when Gailey started him the first game of his freshman year. He could chalk it up to nerves then, but against an utterly anemic Carolina today, there's just no getting around it: Georgia Tech this year is living proof that a good quarterback is not a prerequisite to a winning football season. I guess it's great that Tashard Choice got showcased so well (32 carries!) but Calvin Johnson's talent is utterly wasted on Ball's incompetence. A halfway decent QB would put Johnson in the running for the Heisman. I mean, let's get real--they refer to him as a "Heisman candidate" to be polite. No one gets the Heisman after getting 13 yards against arguably the worst team in the conference.

On the plus side, Tech did a great job converting 3rd downs, and their red zone defense was brutal (2 interceptions in the endzone). And I'm really looking forward to seeing Tech play in the first ACC championship game.

But at the moment, I am dreading the trip to Athens.

post mortem

So Secretary of Defense (an unelected position) Donald Rumsfeld resigns a day after his boss’s party got their ass handed to them, but the likely Democratic sweep of Congress was not—repeat NOT—a repudiation of the ill-conceived and, um, even iller (more illy?) executed war in Iraq, and you would be a fool and a terrorist sympathizer to think so.

quote of the day

Here.

Have a good one!

if you must vote tomorrow

...please make sure that you are doing it in self defense.

Me, I'm sitting this one out for a number of reasons, chief among them that at this point I really don't care about anything I could be voting for. It's a slow year in NC, and between Durham and Chapel Hill, the odds of my newly adopted congressional district electing anyone other than a Democrat are approximately equal to the odds that I will convert to Islam.

If I still lived in AZ, I would almost certainly be voting against Randy Graf and John Kyl (notice how they are both suspiciously missing letters from their names?) though I am at a loss for a single reason to vote for their opponents.

I will, however, venture a prediction, which I base on absolutely nothing factual or uniquely insightful: the Democrats will win both houses tomorrow (the House comfortably, the Senate just barely, and there will likely be recounts involved in the latter) and the next two years will be so spectacularly unspectacular that another Republican will coast into the White House in 2008.

You heard it here first.

today is everything’s going to be ok friday

Well, this is some of the best news I’ve heard in a while:

Researchers here say that padding the diet with resveratrol, a compound in the skin of grapes and in red wine, lets mice eat a high-calorie Big Mac-style diet without suffering many of the associated ill effects -- except to get fat.
Compared with animals on the same diet without the compound, the resveratrol-fed mice gained weight but lived longer, remained healthier, and had livers, blood vessels, and muscle tissue that was similar to those seen in mice fed an ostensibly healthier diet.

So…maybe you can eat what you like and live just as long, as long as you wash it down with lots of red wine.

Life is good.