Daily Archives: February 7, 2005

Social Security Shell Game

This entry was posted in bush Economics Federal Government Republicans on by

No surprise, it is the bushter himself moving the shells around. While he pretends that younger workers will benefit from his proposals the truth is, well, different. Read this from the Minnesota Star Tribune for pointers to just a few misdirections.
There are a lot of changes I’d like to see made to Social Security starting with separating its accounting entirely from the general fund and ending with, yes, privatization some time in the future.
Based on their current presentations I have zero confidence that the bush administration can or even wants to implement a viable process to accomplish this. But, then, these are the folks that brought us that fine prescription drug plan a while back.
Via Talkleft.

Frog Day

This entry was posted in Biology Friday Ark Humor Science on by

Click through at The Presurfer to find out “What Kind of Frog are You?”
Today:
pixiefrog.jpg The African bullfrog, or Pixie frog as it is often called (because of it’s latin name, not because it’s as cute as a fairy!), is one of the largest frogs in South Africa. Usually, they hang out in open grassland, and if there are any to be found, they’ll sit around in puddles. When startled, these frogs will blow up like balloons to scare away the intruder! In the dry season, they will burrow into the ground. These guys eat lots and lots of really big bugs, fish, mice, lizards, and even other frogs.
Or, also courtesy of The Presurfer, if you just want to look at frogs go see a random one.

The World’s Biggest, But is it Useful

This entry was posted in Google Information Internet Technology on by

The folks at Web’s Biggest say that they are “The World’s Biggest Directory Search Engine.” Last week Internetweek reported that:

A Web search engine that uses the “whois” database said Friday that it searches more Web sites than any other search engine, including Google, which crawls the Web in a different manner for its search results. ….
“Other search engines missed from a third to more than half of the Web sites [included] in the Web’s Biggest search results,” the firm stated.
Always on the outlook for better information sources I headed right over and entered a search that has pointed a few visitors to Modulator: live strong bands. The results were 3 references that appeared to be paid adds and they were preceded by this message:
Important: We suggest you make your search LESS specific. Please remember you are not searching the contents of web pages like you do at Google or Yahoo. You are searching one paragraph website descriptions. Furthermore, you will only find websites that contain EACH of your keywords in their description. Web’s Biggest is designed to find websites devoted to what you are looking for, not web pages that happen to contain those words.
On the other hand a search for Lance Armstrong generated quite a few results.
Want to find the text of the state of the union speech? Well, it is #2 on Google and the Web’s Biggest responds with the above “be less specific” message and no links of any kind. And it was a bit slow doing that.
Lesson: use your preferred traditional search service first. In fact, I’m still puzzling over why I’d use them at all…