A third Johnson bill signed by the governor, SB 1438, requires that any electronic voting system approved by the secretary of state after January 2005 include a printout that voters can use to check the accuracy of their ballot. ...

He also signed AB 384 by Assemblyman Tim Leslie (R-Tahoe City), which prohibits adult and youth prison inmates from smoking.

The Stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) became the foundation for an entire "Death 'n' Dying" Movement ... while there is no doubt Kübler-Ross made an important contribution to the treatment of dying patients ... she also contributed to a kind of cultlike reverence for the allegedly superior truth-telling wisdom of the dying ....

But then, quietly, in the late '70s, the Queen began to go around the bend, began declaring there was no death, there were only "transitions" from one permeable boundary to another. And often back. So, if one takes her belief seriously, not only have the reports of her death been exaggerated but reports of death itself have been exaggerated. ...

... its popular success was due in large part to the behavior control function of the five stages and its appeal to hospital and hospice caregivers, who all took D 'n' D workshops. It made the five stages into a kind of moral progress: Potentially disruptive and annoying anger would give way to the more quiet stages of "depression" and "acceptance." Easier on the night nurses.

Well. I guess I can get rid of the Five Stages poster with pushpin I used when Piazza was traded to the Marlins.

California air regulators Friday unanimously approved the world's most stringent rules to reduce auto emissions that contribute to global warming ... The industry has threatened to challenge the regulations in court. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has expressed support for the proposals and has pledged to fight any such lawsuits.

Q: You’ve been compared with Trump. Are you a clone?

A: You won’t catch me in a suit, you won’t catch him out of one. His businesses are built on other people’s money and doing deals. My businesses are built on sweat equity and building businesses. He dismisses his casino partners’ problems as not his; I can’t sleep at night if my partners aren’t successful. I play basketball, he plays golf. I go to sports bars, he goes to black-tie dinners.

— Mark Cuban

When I got on the internet in 1991, it wasn't the Web. It was the internet. (And men were real men, women were real women, and little green aliens from Alpha Centauri were real little green aliens from Alpha Centauri.) I spent a lot of time in newsgroups (where some of my earlier, stupid posts are still preserved for all time in usenet archives), and in particular rec.sport.baseball. I learned, from convincing arguments with sound statistics and methods, that most common baseball statistics were meaningless. Runs, RBIs, batting average - all nearly worthless for measuring the ability to win games or to predict that ability into the future. This wisdom is shunned by the anti-intellectual, good-old-boys network of baseball and by the media.

Moneyball is the tightly written story of how the right manager for the right team at the right time finally broke the barrier to these ideas in major league baseball, with the result that the Oakland A's have simultaneously been among the top three teams in total games won, and the lowest three teams in total payroll, for five years in a row.

Billy Beane is the iconoclastic manager, prepared for his role by a baseball career that failed even though his althletic style and classic baseball physique made him look like a great ballplayer. The Oakland A's management refused to spend money but supported Billy in every other way. And the baseball establishment continues to undervalue players who don't look right, or who don't have the right (meaningless) statistics.

I highly recommend this book even to all; baseball fans will learn a lot, and people who either know nothing or far too much about baseball will still enjoy a great read from a talented writer.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. William Easterly.
Globalization and its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz

Stiglitz and Easterly both talk in depth about the failure of the first-world economic instutions, the World Bank and IMF in particular, to make a positive difference in world poverty. And both take a while to cut to the chase, both draw some blood but also throw some wild punches, and both avoid other obvious conclusions.

Easterly takes half his book to name his main villains, corrupt governments and the financial experts who enable them. But his world still seems populated by earnest men in suits who really would like to see an end to poverty. Stiglitz sinks his fangs to the gums into IMF, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin, for following rigidly ideological prescriptions with arrogant certainty (low inflation uber alles, high interest rates as needed, and free flow of capital) even after these prescriptions are challenged as ineffective or counterproductive. Stiglitz connects the dots as far as saying that these rich bankers favor their own interests over those of developing countries. Beyond that, his rage seems triggered by a perception that these villains would rather see millions in poverty rather than question their own opinions. The step he doesn't take, though, is to say that they may have reasons for preferring this state of affairs. In other words, he doesn't go all the way to Zinn, Chomsky, and the rest.

• Quality Assurance and Bathing; Why Nobody Loves You
• Politics in QA Management 2; Gas Warfare and Advisory Panels
• Breaking New Ground; 1.0 Projects and Iranian Mineclearing Techniques

At least three or four times since Reagan's death, most recently tonight during radio reporting of the part of the Republican convention in which a commemorative video was shown, I have heard reporters and commentators giving misty-eyed reminiscences about hearing President Reagan say, "Mr Gorbachev, tear this wall down." He said no such thing, not ever. People sometimes say linguists fuss over trivia, but I can't believe anyone could see this point as trivial.

It's so strange that people should misremember, for two reasons. First, the correct original version still phonetically rings in my ears, unforgettably, and I would have thought that would be true for anyone who heard it (which would include even a 30-year-old junior reporter: the speech was in 1987); and second, the way he put it — synonymous, but with with very slightly different syntax — is so much more compelling. The rhythm is better; the parallel with the preceding sentence ("Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!") is better; and (let me get technical for just a second) the crucial direct object is positioned as last constituent in the verb phrase, not followed by the anticlimax of a particle that belongs with the verb, so the nuclear stress coincides perfectly with the final monosyllable which delivers the pragmatic punch, the key piece of new information conveyed by the final noun. Syntax, prosody and pragmatics in perfect harmony. What President Reagan said, very deliberately — and they say it was audible over on the other side in East Berlin — was: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
— Geoffrey K. Pullum