Chris Blattman

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Links I liked

1. Balkan peace and harmony: you can find it in prison

2. The new Senegalese national pastime? Scrabble

3. Are Europeans mocking Obama?

4. In a survey of academic salaries in 15 countries, Canada is top and China is bottom.

5. Do Coca Cola shortages cause political crises in Africa?

6. The best Gmail tip I’ve ever seen

7. The latest in AIDS research: men are more likely to want sex with a 40 year-old when they are aroused.

8. And from McSweeneys, Please Allow Sylvester Stallone a Few Words on Behalf of the Polar Bear

I know what it’s like to get knocked down. And I also know that sometimes we all need a little help getting back on our feet. As we speak, a friend of mine is on the ropes. I’d like to talk to you today about an environmental problem that affects us all: the disappearance of the polar bear and his precious supply of polar-bear growth hormone (PBGH). …I come to you as a thoughtful and concerned American who is at great risk of shrinking by at least 120 pounds if we lose this magnificent Arctic creature.

5 Responses

  1. The NYT got it completely wrong. I seriously wonder who they talked to. As a German I can attest you that most Germans were very excited about Obama’s visit and the majority (according to a poll) are rooting for him to win the election.
    The NYT’s sampling of media coverage can also be described as more than biased, with other newspapers, for instance, asking when Germany will finally have a Obama-like politician.

  2. As for link #6: the + is a neat feature, but it still exposes your address (it’s like appending a number to your street address: people can still find out where you live.)

    If you want to protect the integrity of your e-mail box (that is, the ability to prevent the receipt of unwanted e-mail), here is an alternative strategy that I’ve taken to:
    Set up an account with Google Apps for your Domain, then you can create different e-mail accounts for whatever purposes (so you could set up a shop@chrisblattman.com, polisci101@chrisblattman.com). Then, in the account settings for each of those e-mails, forward them to your main account and use the filtering function there.

    It’s a little more work to set up (you would have to enter the MX records into your DNS provider), but I think it’s better, since it keeps your main e-mail address “hidden” (at least, I think it does). Also, if, at some point, you wanted to change your main email provider, you’d be easily able to transition to another account (since all you’d have to do is forward the Google Apps e-mails). And there would be plenty of data redundancy (since each of the Google Apps email addresses would save the emails they receive).

    Besides that, people won’t have to know that you’re beholden to Google. Of course, they can always WHOIS your domain name to see where you actually live, so…

  3. Susan Neiman is talking absolute nonsense – may be she has an illusion of what idealism means in EU-27 today.

    Obama was more than well received and compared to the dude from west texas, he measures up to European idealism.

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