This week in self-injury news:

Sliced the side of my ring finger really good while shaving a few days ago. Luckily I just made a flap instead of taking the whole chunk off, so I was able to hold it in place and seal the wound, eventually. Lots of blood.

Last night I was chewing on some small piece of plastic and breathed it right into my throat. Lots of coughing and gagging until I finally I spit it out, but of course now my throat is really sore. This one's really just as embarrassing as it is painful.

Dr. Albert Bartlett (Professor Emeritus, Physics Department, University of Colorado):

Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?

This seems pretty easy. Science, sports, construction. The more people we have, the more people we get working on these things.

A local increase in population (up to a certain maximum that I can't recall at the moment) supposedly makes the provision of city services more efficient per capita, though I'm just taking my Human Geography professor's word for this. More people in a region increases trade, which increases wealth for everyone.

Anyhow, this is the same guy who said "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.", which is the quote I really like. As far as I've seen, people often don't have good intuition about things governed by the exponential function.

This is amazingly stupid. I really want to support unions, but organized labor seems to go out of its way to show that the downside outweighs the upside.
http://www.cupe.on.ca/doc.php?document_id=677&lang=en
How does CUPE have an interest in Palestine? Oh right, international socialism:

ARTICLE 25
1. Work is a right, duty and honor. The Palestinian National Authority shall strive to provide it to any individual capable of performing it.

Not even evil socialist countries like Canada offer work to anyone who wants it.

You don't see a lot of Akbar photoshops around these days. It's too bad.

25 in a row. Doubt I'll ever beat that.

Econ Talk is still ruling.

Every night after I'm done working, reading, etc. I play tetris and listen to podcasts.

Lately I've revived a game I used to play on my NES -- tetris-only tetris, or "greedy" tetris. The idea is to only get tetrises, and see how many you can get in a row with no single/double/triple lines in between.

So far my best is 19. I average about 8 or 9; sometimes I get zero.

I've been playing at http://www.1980-games.com/us/old-games/nintendo/t/Tetris/game.php (in Big Game mode).

I've been listening to White Coat, Black Art and EconTalk. Both are great.

For a number of years the MTS and Shaw USENET servers have been pretty useless (and the MTS server is now defunct). I don't remember how I initially did, but finding http://www.eternal-september.org/ was a happy occasion.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a lot of groups that are still worthwhile. I miss the days when USENET was the best thing going for technical discussions. I think I'll keep sifting for a couple more weeks and see if I can come up with anything good. Most good discussions have moved on to web forums and mailing lists, though even good mailing lists seems hard to come by these days.

One strategy will be to go through http://yarchive.net and see if any of those groups are still active.

Amazing! http://firstpersontetris.com/

It's an old gag, but I laughed a lot.

Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.

Oh, Schneier.