Chart of the day

As someone who had to sit in traffic recently I was incensed. How could God do this to me! As it turns out, God doesn't hate me as much as he hates other parts of the country. So, apparently there wasn't some universal force conspiring to screw me over worse than everyone else in the entirety of recorded history. Who knew?

But because they are good citizens and decent Americans, the people at Good magazine decided to graph out this information of how long certain American cities spend sitting in traffic and do it in comparison to how long it would take someone to read War and Peace, listen to Wagner's Ring cycle, or watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I know no one has ever read War and Peace or listened to Der Ring des Nibelungen, but just use them as stand ins for the concept of "unimaginably long shit."

It turns out that if you lived in LA, the traffic would have given you a chance to be incredibly literarily and operatically cultured... if you didn't live in LA and weren't an American. But you would have gotten to see Frodo a hell of a lot of times. Yeaaaah!

As always, click to embiggen.

The Chileans broke the planet

Have you ever wished the day was a little shorter? You know, just so there were a few less minutes in your day to sit around without a job or just to make 5 o'clock come around sooner because then it's OK to drink and GODDAMNIT YOU DONT HAVE A PROBLEM, SHELIA!!!

Well then, this whole Chilean earthquake thing must have been a tremendous boon to you and a subject of some personal pride, you monster. You got your wish.

The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
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“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).

So not only is the day shorter in an increment that can only be appreciated by hummingbirds and Olympic sprinters, the earth was thrown off it's axis by three whole inches. The three inch axis shift was so violent that a scientist stationed at a scientific outpost was slightly nudged into a co-worker while at the dinner table, throwing the meal into an unpleasant conversation about "personal boundary issues" about certain "creepy, bug-eyed glaciologists" that "had already been warned about the pawing and touching, Roger." Suffice to say, dessert was uncomfortable.

So remember, in order to fully stick it to the man and wring out every benefit you can from a 8.8 magnitude earthquake: start leaving work 1.26 microseconds early. Otherwise the time shift is just going to come out of your sleep and leisure time. And if you want to start knocking off some tenths of a second, you know, real time, then start praying for some really big earthquakes. It's all just a matter of the CIA turning a knob on their earthquake causing satellite.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 08.13

'Walking Dead' strolls to AMC
Robert Kirkman's zombie comic The Walking Dead. Weekly series on AMC, network of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Written and directed by Frank Darabont. Woo, and might I add, hoo. You're all lucky Blogspot can't audibly transmit the sound of a boner happening, otherwise you'd be hearing it now.

'SPIDER-MAN' A NO-SHOW
Sadly this nation's greatest chance to pay for the privilege of gawking at an absolute trainwreck, a $45 million Spider-Man musical written by U2, has fallen by the wayside as show runners realized the stupidity of their idea and the fact that this show would in no way be profitable. I will say this doesn't bode well for the $50 million dollar musical Sean and I wrote about the Thundercats.

Jim Cramer's Housing Bottom Call Revisited (VIDEO)
Miss that happy feeling you used to get when you got to see Jim Cramer on the TV getting his testicles stolen by John Stewart or generally just apologizing for being an awful financial guru? Don't worry, he's still out there making terrible predictions about the housing market. Go point and laugh, my children.

Death Panels
Joe Klein of Time Magazine takes on the asinine "death panel" nonsense the debate on health care has turned into. He does it by explaining what the provision that Sarah Palin and her inbred ilk are distorting actually says and by providing a personal example of the usefulness of such a program. It of course won't get covered as much as Senator Grassley smearing himself in his own excrement and yelling about how a man from the government buried his grandmother alive to save a nickel for his socialist masters.

Fox News gets okay to misinform public, court ruling
We all knew deep down in our hearts that this was true, but it's nice to finally have the courts officially rule on it. It is in fact perfectly legal to lie and use your airwaves as a promotional vehicle for those lies even as you are touting yourself as a news program or news network. Whew! Fox dodged a bullet there. Can you imagine what that place would be like if Hannity or Beck had to tell the truth? Ah well, consider this a favor from the courts to the Especially Gruesome Suicide Clean-up Division of the NYPD.

When the clock chimes the end is nigh

KILL IT WITH FIRE!!

This is the Corpus Clock at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It was invented by John C. Taylor, cost $1 million dollars, involved six new patents, was one of TIME's best inventions of 2008, should be able to run accurately for over 200 years, and is creepy as all unholy fuck. Also: CONSPIRACY!!!!!!!!

John C. Taylor said that the clock “is terrifying. It is meant to be... I view time as not on your side. He’ll eat up every minute of your life...”. He refers to the “Chronophage”, the locust at the top of the clock as “demonic”, and states “Time is gone. He’s eaten it.”

The inscription at the base of this mysterious clock, which incorporates six undisclosed patented inventions, and which had components constructed at a secret military research facility in Holland, is from the Vulgate translation of John 2:17: “Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius”... “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof.”
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We, a group of concerned individuals, have since the unveiling of the Corpus Clock been conducting heavy research concerning the creators of this clock, and the strange occult symbolism embedded within it’s design.

We are working to make our research public, in order to inform the public and allow people to draw their own conclusions about this mysterious device and its origins and purpose.

All I'm saying is that when the world ends, and that will probably be soon, this clock will tell us and/or trigger the end times. I just wanted you all to be aware of that and know the horrid face of the creature that devours all time. Wired had a nice video describing how exactly it chews and eats seconds and terrifies children:

The bright, shiny, happy wisdom of Paul Krugman

I know we're all worried, what with the economy and birds downing all our helicopters, but Paul Krugman is happy. He's figured out a solution. Turns out that even if the stimulus plan doesn't work, in the long run, the economy will recover on it's own. What's the long run mean? A couple of decades or so.

Now, the Great Depression was ended by massive fiscal expansion, in the form of World War II. Maybe that will happen again; but so far policy seems inadequate to the task, and the political environment raises concerns about whether we’ll be able to do much more.

So we may end up waiting for the economy’s ills to go into spontaneous remission. Which raises the question, how does that happen?

And it turns out that this is a question our grandfathers thought about quite a lot. Maybe it’s time to dust off Keynesian business cycle theory.
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Recovery comes because low investment eventually produces a backlog of desired capital stock, through use, delay, and obsolescence. And eventually this leads to an investment recovery, which is self-reinforcing.

And what do we mean by use, delay, etc.? Calculated Risk had a nice piece on auto sales, which I find helps me to think about this concretely. As CR pointed out, at current rates of sale it would take 23.9 years to replace the existing vehicle stock.
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As autos go, so goes the capital stock. In the long run, we will have a spontaneous economic recovery, even if all current policy initiatives fail. On the other hand, in the long run...

...we'll all be dead. So no need to worry, if government isn't up to it, we all just need to hunker down for a little over two decades until business is sufficiently destitute to need reinvestment and our infrastructure resembles that of late seventies Russia. Then we can start growing this bitch of an economy! Of course we might need to reinvest in everything because we've devolved into an agrarian barter economy and have been relearning iron age technology and how to exist without power for about a decade.

Technically at some point our devolved society would return to using the technologies of the 19th century, perhaps our great-grandchildren will re-unlock the secrets of the coal mine and those bicycles with the one big wheel and the small back wheel. Then the economy will grow, just as the Keynesian business cycle predicted! Happy hunkering, the decades will fly by. Horde the secrets of fire.

No alarms, no surprises, Obama Time's PotY

In a move that surprised no one, our President Elect Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho Barack Hussein Obama
is Time's Person of the Year. Or the guy who made that Obama painting is, I didn't really read it. To top it off he isn't PotY in that cheap way we all were when they put a mirror on the cover and said we were important, or in that "He's a complete monster, but he was important" way that Hitler, bin Laden, and Stalin were.

He isn't important enough for them to get a new picture idea though. Just throw a few texture layers in photoshop on that OBEY guy's work and call it a day. I like Obama's background, a huge windmill and a large dollar sign. Clearly the two biggest symbols representing his campaign.

The runners up were "Big Bank" Hank Paulson, Sarah Palin, Nick Sarkozy, and Zhang Yimou, the creator of the 'Saved By Zero' Toyota commercial, and the Jonas Brothers. So yeah, I'm betting Barry swept the vote.