The Democratic Dividend – The stock market prefers Democratic presidents to Republicans. Why? By Carol Vinzant Republicans are no doubt muttering that that’s just the stock market, not the whole economy. But real GDP growth follows the same pattern. Since 1930 (the first year decent data is available), GDP growth was 5.4 percent for Democratic presidents and 1.6 percent for Republicans.

Same pattern, perhaps, but the difference in GDP growth (More than a 3 fold difference) is even more striking that the difference in the growth of the Dow (12.3% for Democratic Presidents and 8% for replublican, only a 50% difference).

Salon.com Life | World’s funniest joke is named

Not all animal jokes, for example, are created equal — jokes mentioning ducks were rated as funnier than other jokes.

I knew it, and now I have scientific proof!

Yay! Google has finally re-indexed my blog.

Yahoo! News – Airlines Fear Collapse Without More Help

The debt-ridden U.S. airline industry will be near ruin if the government does not help it reduce costs related to aviation security, the chief executive at the world’s biggest carrier warned Congress on Tuesday.

The airline industry, or at least the part occupied by the major carriers, suffers from unsound economics. The situation is only going to get worse for them in the short term as regional and discount carriers further undermine their crumbling business models. In the longer term, Air Taxi service is likely to erode the big carriers margins even more. Bailing out the industry now, in toto, would be a huge waste of money.

I’m not sure the best thing to do, but one possibility is to just let it ride until some of the weakest carriers fail or are forced to merge with healthier carriers.

Sure, travellers might be faced with more expensive tickets, but its better in the long run that the industry is sustainable.

Entertainment Tonight’s post-event covereage of the Emmys featured a 360 degree camera from Enroute technologies.

Appearantly this is a system of mirrors, cameras and digital signal processors that allow a 360degree view to be captured on video. On playback the view can be panned to look at any part of the frame. The Entertainment Tonight broadcast was not a great showcase for the technology.

1. Only one shot made real use of it (Martin Sheen throwing a piece of trash and a pan to it hitting a photographer. Other shots were basically static shots that gratuitiously adjusted the “camera” slightly.

2. The stupid phony motor noise as they pivioted the view was irritaing

3. It looked like crap. The picture was muddy & poorly focused, etc. The focus thing, I guess, can be excused, but it should have been crisper, and it should have scrolled smoothly since this wasn’t live.

All an all, not an impressive demo.