Category: The Dish

Or rather: the Plagiarius Awards for 2008.

Putting actual, old-fashioned sugar in your coffee can, er, optimize your high. Nicotine helps too. Just saying.

Glenn Reynolds reports on the latest in anti-aging research. Fascinating. One possible implication of extending life spans:

… on a societal level, the extension of peoples’ productive working lives could pay huge dividends. If people stay youthful longer, we’ll see less pressure on the stressed-out social security systems of most industrialized countries. If 65-year-olds were as vigorous as 35-year-olds, or even 45-year-olds, there would be no reason to fund their retirement. Pushing the retirement age back a decade or two could save trillions. And, of course, if you can actually reverse aging, the whole notion of retirement becomes obsolete.

Check out the penultimate line.

You recall: the poignant stand-out that voted for Clinton alone among all the counties in Washington State. They recounted. She lost it.

That’s the news from the Democratic race:

“She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out,” said one superdelegate who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “The campaign is starting to come to terms with that.” Campaign advisers, also speaking privately in order to speak plainly, confirmed this view.

Several Clinton superdelegates, whose votes could help decide the nomination, said Monday that they were wavering in the face of Mr. Obama’s momentum after victories in Washington State, Nebraska, Louisiana and Maine last weekend.

Some said that they, like the hundreds of uncommitted superdelegates still at stake, might ultimately “go with the flow,” in the words of one, and support the candidate who appears to show the most strength in the primaries to come.

A reader from Sweden writes:

The Swedes here only ask me one question, "Who will be the next President, Hillary or Obama?" They never ask about the Republicans, and they are so open-minded here it never crosses their minds why we wouldn’t want to elect either one for any reason. They see no reason a black man or a woman shouldn’t be elected. Some want Hillary because they think the U.S. should be led by a woman, but mostly they have no preference. Also, they don’t understand why people dislike Hillary so much.

But Swedes are not the only people here with opinions on the subject.  There are also a lot of immigrants from the middle east and while I have only spoken with a few, one opinion that stuck out was from a Kurdish gentleman who was for Hillary because he thinks she will leave U.S. troops in "Kurdistan" forever.

An analogy for the Obama-Clinton race.

Maybe this is the key to your fortune: getting a computer to write books for you. Easy as pie:

The book-writing machine works simply, at least in principle. First, one feeds it a recipe for writing a particular genre of book – a tome about crossword puzzles, say, or a market outlook for products. Then hook the computer up to a big database full of info about crossword puzzles or market information. The computer uses the recipe to select data from the database and write and format it into book form.

Parker estimates that it costs him about 12p to write a book, with, perhaps, not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA might produce.

Nothing but the title need actually exist until somebody orders a copy. At that point, a computer assembles the book’s content and prints up a single copy.

That’s how you get a best-seller like "The 2007 Import and Export Market for Seaweeds and Other Algae in France."

Reihan on Obama’s apparently tame background in drugs.