Weekend Linkee-poo is caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender

Kalayna gives a good demonstration about word choice and rewriting for effect.

John Scalzi on writing with an iPad. Yep. My thoughts exactly.

An NPR story on the use of fast and cheap genetics testing and how it's altering medicine. They've been running the series all this past week about how we're approaching a full genome report for less than a $1000 and in under an hour. You may remember the first 3 full genome reports costing billions and taking over a decade, and that was only about 15 years ago. (Grokked from Jay Lake)

Want to know how we produce and consumer energy in lots and lots of detail? Of course you do. And here's a quick primer for 2011 with a pointer to the full report from the US Energy Information Administration. You know, for Obama doing all these horrible things by keeping companies from exploring and generating energy and fuels in the US, our production seems to have gone up anyway, and we seem to be exporting more (that's the vagaries of oil production, it's a world market after all). (Grokked from Paolo Bacigalupi)

Paul Krugman on how this wasn't the election anyone was expecting. Unemployment over 8%, approval ratings starting below 40%, negative news cycle after negative news cycle, an ambassador killed, this shouldn't even be close. The thing is, the president isn't so much winning as conservatives are losing. Part of it could be that enough people realize one side isn't playing with reality. But I think it's more of just how far to the right the Republicans have gone. You know, not to mention dissing 47% of the US public when a large percentage of those people actually vote Republican. Reliably. We're still a month out and there's a reason there is a term "October Surprise." (Grokked from Jay Lake)

I often use the phrase "freeze dried whackaloons." You may wonder just exactly what I'm talking about. Well, Jim Wright has some excellent examples of this. And, again, the freeze dried whackaloon quotient goes up.

"… (Romney) missed the deeper truth. It is not just that most of the 47 percent… do pay payroll taxes and that many of them have paid income taxes in the past. The reality he glossed over is that nearly all Americans have used government social policies at some point in their lives. The beneficiaries include the rich and the poor, Democrats and Republicans. Almost everyone is both a maker and a taker." The problem is most people don't even see it that way. And one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately as we talk about the various deductions Romney will eliminate that would turn a majority of people against his plan, most pundits talk about the home mortgage interest deduction as an example of people using a government program that they won't want to lose but often don't think of as a government program. I have one better. The deduction for dependent children. You know, the backbone of the Bush Era tax cuts for the middle class. I understand this most because I don't have kids and those "tax cuts" mostly passed me by. (Grokked from Jay Lake)