Free pills more important than jobs?

That's what Obama thinks.  He's offering free contraception pills.  He is hoping that women voters will vote for him to get free pills, at the risk of losing their jobs, and the risk of their husbands losing their jobs.  Is this gonna work for Obama?  I'd like to think American women are too smart to fall for a simple ploy like that.

Gallup says 54% of Americans are OK with TSA

I saw this one both Instapundit and Slashdot.  Why do I have trouble believing it?

100 Best YA novels according to NPR

There is a long list, some good, some I never heard of.  Some old favorites are missing.  Like the C.S. Lewis Narnia stories. Nothing by Andre Norton. No Montgomery Atwater stories.  No Poul Anderson.  The Borrowers are missing. Nothing by Edgar Rice Burroughs. No Jules Verne.  No Three Musketeers. 
   Then it does have some awful distopias, Lord of the Flies and The Giver.  I suppose they made it in because English teachers like distopias and assign them as required reading. 
   Then the ranking is odd.  Harry Potter comes in as #1, with Lord of the Rings pushed down to #7.  Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is #8, but his much better Martian Chronicles is missing all together.   Just how the list was put together is not given, apparently there was some editorial weeding out, and some listener voting, but just how good a list it is, is unclear.  It might reflect the likings of NPR staff, or just NPR listeners, or it might be more broadbased. 

Life Extension Program for Nuclear Weapons

The B-61 nuclear weapon, a plain old gravity bomb, entered service in the early 1970's.  A large number (hundreds for sure, perhaps thousands, its classified) were built and are still in service.  B-61 featured "dial-a-yield" by which the bomb can be adjusted from city-smashing size down to a nuclear cherry bomb. 
Although it has never been used in action, some forty years in service  ought to indicate that it is fairly satisfactory, and they are all built and paid for.
   In Washington there is a move afoot to spend another $10 billion dollars on the B-61's.  The Air Force wants to add a guidance system to improve accuracy.  We really need that.  These are nukes, with a total destruction radius measured in miles.  Get the bomb with a mile or so of the aim point, and that target is vaporized.  World War II mechanical bomb sights were good enough for that. 
   Then they want to "consolidate" the various flavors of the B-61.  Naturally over a production run of forty years, changes were introduced, and the experts recognize half a dozen varients of the B-61.  Money would be spent to make them all the same.  Not a bad idea mind you, but hardly necessary. 
   Anyhow they want to spent $10 billion on modifications to a perfectly serviceable weapon.  Sounds like a good place to do a little sequestration. 

Apple goes after Samsung

Apple is suing Samsung for patent infringement; they are claiming that the Samsung smart phone infringes on patented features of the Iphone.  They are in court now, and getting solid coverage in the Wall St Journal.  Lots of chit and chat about the lawyers on each side, and revelations on the Apple product development process, including marketing budgets at Apple.
  No talk at all about what was patented, and where Samsung's phone infringed it.
  Your patent office at work, making it easier for high tech businesses.

Re-Arranging deck chairs on the Titanic

In DC we have Congresscritters re arranging statues in town.   Eleanor Holmes Norton (the non voting DC representative in the House)  wants to move a statue of Frederick Douglass from it's current location (1 Judiciary  Square) to some place inside the Capitol. 
   Douglass is an inspiring American from the Civil War era, and fully deserves a statue.  I'm not knocking Douglass.  But I'd just as soon have his statue out in the open where I can see it, rather than stuck away inside the Capitol where I cannot.  They don't let citizens inside the Capitol building  anymore. 
  Plus, we have lots of serious issues that Congress is neglecting.  But they have time to re arrange the statues while headed full speed for that iceberg.

Revenge of the Nerds

Small Wall St stock brokerage Knight Capital  turned on their brand new computer trading program Wednesday.  Something went wrong and the computer managed to loose $440 million dollars by quitting time.  This nearly put Knight out of business.  They only had $365 million cash on hand.  According to the Wall St Journal, Knight did a lot of telephoning and a lot of hands and knees work and Goldman Sachs bailed them out.  Sort of.  As of Friday night Knight was still scrambling to borrow enough money to stay in business.
   Wow!  Pretty good work for a mere computer program.  And what are those programmers doing right now? They ought to be going underground and fleeing the country.  There has gotta be one humungous lawsuit coming out of this fiasco.
   It's not clear just what the program was doing.  The Journal describes the program as something cooked up by, or at least with the support of, the New York Stock Exchange.  It was supposed to allow trades to be executed with prices in fractions of a penny.   Just why anyone would want to do that is unclear.  A penny ain't worth much and a fraction of a penny is pretty close to worthless.  Unless you are trading millions of shares.
   The program probably was doing, and bungling, "high speed trading".  This exercise in capital allocation looks at stock prices and buys rising stocks and sells falling stocks.  It's fast enough to detect the instant a rising stock starts to fall and bang out sell orders faster than a plain old human broker.