Aaron Swartz describes a new Google program in which you place some HTML on your site which causes your readers’ browser to request ads from Google. Google, having analyzed your site, sends ads it thinks are particularly relevant to your content. In return for letting Google do this on your site, you get paid 50 cents every time one of your readers clicks on an ad. If you have a weblog or other website and are curious as to what ads Google would think are relevant to your content, Swartz has a gadget on his site that will tell you.

Swartz says that he made $100 from the program in one day and argues that this system might make small ‘labor of love’ weblogs viable. Nota bene: I won’t be implementing this system. This labor of love is a freebie for you.

“I was preparing for an international trip, and I thought, ‘what can I do to tell as many people as possible in other countries that many Americans vehemently disagree with the policies of our own government?‘ So I made this shirt, and various wonderful people translated it into all of the official UN languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. Buy one for your own international travels. A domestic version (US$16), without English, is also available for those who want to make a statement, but not to monolingual locals.”

deserving of a ‘standing’ ovation KFOR.com

Yes. There’s no reason for Bush-bashers to choose between the two.

…Can a false statement be a lie if the speaker is unaware it is a lie?… Why is the speaker unaware that his statement is a lie? In Bush’s case, the answer is painfully obvious. It’s because Bush is a functionally not-bright man. As Chatterbox has explained elsewhere, it’s impossible to tell—and, ultimately, of little interest—whether Bush lacks the necessary mental equipment, or whether he’s simply incurious. The end result is the same. Even Bush’s allies concede that Bush is strikingly ignorant. In the July Vanity Fair, Sam Tanenhaus quoted Richard Perle as saying that when he first met Bush, it was “clear” that “he didn’t know very much.” Perle went on to argue (with what he failed to recognize as condescension) that Bush is an eager pupil. But there isn’t much evidence to support even that.

It’s often said that Bush has the virtue of self-awareness, that he knows what he doesn’t know. That’s probably true. But if it is true, then Bush really oughtn’t to go around making sweeping statements that he hasn’t made any effort to verify. When these statements turn out to be untrue, Bush’s feigned certainty alone justifies calling these statements lies. — Timothy Noah, Slate chatterbox

“…will open Friday for anyone who wants to block sales calls.

Officials at the registry also announced a number of new regulations today, including a requirement that telemarketers transmit their telephone numbers to caller-ID devices and that they have a live operator on the line within two seconds of the consumer’s picking up the phone.

Online registration will be available at www.donotcall.gov, officials said. The trade commission has staggered phone registration to handle the large volume of calls expected. Residents of states west of the Mississippi, including Minnesota and Louisiana, may register by phone starting Friday at 12:01 a.m.. The entire country will be able to register by phone as of July 7. The phone number is (888) 382-1222. The registry will go into effect Oct. 1.” NY Times

‘cuts heart attacks by 80%’:

“A once-a-day pill for everyone over 55 could undo some of the ill-effects of our sedentary, high-cholesterol, western lifestyle and slash the rate of strokes and heart attacks by more than 80%, doctors said yesterday.

The bold concept of the Polypill, made of a combination of six different drugs, was launched in the British Medical Journal by its inventors with the claim that it could have ‘a greater impact on the prevention of disease in the western world than any other known intervention’.

The editor of the Journal, Richard Smith, piled on the hyperbole, writing that: ‘It’s perhaps more than 50 years since we published something as important as the cluster of papers from Nick Wald, Malcolm Law and others.'” Guardian/UK

Curiously, the Guardian article does not go into precise detail about the proposed content of the PolyPill. This Washington Post article does:

The pill would include aspirin because it has been shown to reduce the risk for heart attacks, probably by limiting the formation of dangerous blood clots. It would also include the nutrient folic acid, which reduces a substance in the blood known as homocysteine, which has been strongly linked to heart disease.

Including one of the cholesterol-lowering drugs, known as statins, which millions already use safely, would be crucial. And finally, the polypill would include three different types of blood-pressure lowering drugs at half the usual doses. It would use three so that each could be given at the lower dose, minimizing side effects like lethargy.

All the components could be used in generic form, minimizing the cost, Wald said.

Under the proposal, the drug would be given to anyone with a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease and everyone age 55 and older, the age when most people begin to develop cardiovascular disease, Wald said. One of the most controversial aspects is that the pill would be given to people without first testing their blood pressure or cholesterol levels.

Sometimes the Supreme Court amazes me in its equity and fairness when I least expect it, such as this victory for people being allowed to do whatever they want when they are minding their own business and not impinging on anyone else. This was a 6-3 ruling with only the most unreasonable — Rehnquist and Scalia — and unqualified, braindead — Thomas — dissenting. Pathetic, repugnant attempt at counterargument from the state of Texas: “Texas defended its sodomy law as in keeping with the state’s interest in protecting marriage and child-rearing. Homosexual sodomy, the state argued in legal papers, ‘has nothing to do with marriage or conception or parenthood and it is not on a par with these sacred choices.'” Salon

Related: Sometimes even Texas can get it right: “FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A jury took less than an hour Thursday to convict a former nurse’s aide of murder for hitting a homeless man with her car, driving home with his mangled body lodged in the windshield and leaving him to die in her garage.” Salon

The defense had argued that this was an accident instead of the pitiless, depraved, wanton destruction of a human life it was.

“Asked to name a linguist, most people come up with Chomsky or Pinker. But Larry Trask – an expert on Basque – deserves to be famous too.:

He’s working now on an etymological dictionary of Basque: his web page contains a trenchant denunciation of all the things that people believe about the language:

‘please note: I do not want to hear about the following: Your latest proof that Basque is related to Iberian/Etruscan/Pictish/Sumerian/ Minoan/Tibetan/Isthmus Zapotec/ Martian. Your discovery that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam inscriptions/the Phaistos disc/ the Easter Island carvings/the Egyptian Book of the Dead/the Qabbala/the prophecies of Nostradamus/your PC manual/the movements of the New York Stock Exchange. Your belief that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind/a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis/the language of the vanished civilization of Antarctica/ evidence of visitors from Proxima Centauri. I definitely do not want to hear about these scholarly breakthroughs.’ “

Guardian/UK