Agylen

After Dave Winer announced he was going to stop blogging soon, now it’s
Russell Beattie’s turn:

Yep, after four years and almost 3,000 posts I’ve decided to close up the Notebook. There’s lots of reasons, but generally this is a continuation of the full-reset I started back in January.

Hmmm… how about some real reasons for this, Russell? And how are you going to satisfy your craving for gadgets now that you’re losing your extra income from ads?

Is this the beginning of a trend? Is blogging finally becoming so popular (think MySpace) and so uncool that early adopters will soon start flocking to something else? I don’t know, but I’m trying to keep going, even if lately I’ve lowered my posting frequency a bit. Too much work and too much traveling, probably.

Anyway, we’ll miss you, Russ.

1. The Left is winning the elections (by a close margin and it’s still statistical projections only, but let’s pretend).
2. My MacBook Pro has arrived and I will pick it up tomorrow.
3. Mark Pilgrim is blogging again, and Rogers Cadenhead switched to Atom. I must upgrade to Wordpress 2 and see if its Atom support is good, then I will switch my main feed to Atom 1.0 as well.
4. It’s raining… oh well, you can’t always win.

Technorati Tags: macbook, intel mac, berlusconi, italy, elections, pilgrim, cadenhead, atom.

How to Lie with Statistics is the title of a nice little book that was first published in the 50’s and that details all the tricks that politicians, economists, journalists, and others use to present statistics in a way that, while not technically false, aims to deceive the public.

Here in Italy, we’ve recently had a particularly blatant instance of the use of this technique by our “beloved” (and soon to be ex-, hopefully) government. 11 million Italian families are the recipients these days of a glossy, 160 page booklet published by Silvio Berlusconi’s party, titled La vera storia italiana (The Real Italian Story). The propaganda booklet, among lots of colorful photographs, provides some interesting “facts”, like the one on page 154, where it is stated that in 2001, when Berlusconi’s government was elected, Italy’s average per-capita income was $24,670, whereas it is $27,119 now. Nice, I am already starting to feel richer.

You might wonder why the amounts are expressed in USD, however. Isn’t the Euro the Italian currency? Well, let’s convert Dollars to Euros, using the conversion rates that were current in 2001 and 2006. For 2001, we use the value of the USD/EUR exchange rate . According to the UIC, on May 22, the day after the latest elections, an Euro was worth 0.8685 Dollars. Yesterday you had to spend 1.2063 Dollars to buy an Euro instead. Quite a difference! So, converting the Dollar amounts above we obtain:

Hmmm… This doesn’t look so nice anymore. We use Euros to buy things, not Dollars, and in five years we lost almost 6,000 Euros. Per capita. And not even taking inflation into account!

Berlusconi is the real king of spin doctors. It’s not at all surprising, therefore, that today he said that leftist voters are “coglioni” (retards). He probably consider all Italians as morons, and they probably are if they believe his numbers.

Technorati Tags: berlusconi, coglioni, italy, elections.