Archive for 2008

I checked out the PFW in Progress podcast for the first times in several weeks - my previous routine of listening to the show regularly having been disrupted by the kind of events life sometimes throws at you - and quickly learned that the cuts down at Gillette Stadium that were announced a month ago [...]

America’s mayors want President-elect Barack Obama to throw them a $73 billion bone, according to ABC News:
According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, there are 11,391 infrastructure projects ready to go in 427 cities across the United States. The conference estimates that these projects represent an infrastructure investment of $73 billion that would be capable [...]

Starting next week Starbucks will cut 2 hours of labor from each store each day.

President elect Barack Obama in his December 7, 2008, video address:
Today, I am announcing a few key parts of my plan. First, we will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that. We need to upgrade our [...]

Today we took the kid to the annual Swedish Christmas fair in Boston, as always held in the Cyclorama in South End, and as usual on the same day that Army and Navy battle it out on national television. Those crazy Swedes. Anyway, we had a good time and I gorged on Princesstårta, våfflor and [...]

[For some reason I just can't go to sleep (must be nervousness over Army-Navy - Go Army! Sink Navy!) so I started playing with some data that the Census Bureau has published. The table below is just a first stab, there will be more. Update: I added a second table that I think is [...]

As expected, the City of Boston’s challenge of the 2007 population estimate by the United States Census Bureau was a partial success. The initial estimate was 599,351 - while the 2007 American Community Survey guesstimated 613,117 - and the revised population estimate for Boston in 2007 is 608,352. Boston had asked for the revised estimate [...]

The table below shows the contributions to and benefit payments from the state unemployment insurance systems in thousands of dollars in the 50 states (it also has the totals for the 50 states just for the heck of it) in fiscal year 2007. The data is from the Census Bureau’s 2007 State Government Finances report [...]

From a Boston Globe article on the suspected murder of a one-year old child in Worcester:
[Suspect Nga] Truong, a junior at South Community High School, lives with her mother, 31-year-old Van Truong, a year-old brother, another brother three years her junior, and a boyfriend of seven months, Edwin Vasquez, 17, who said yesterday that Truong [...]

Radio station call letters are an interesting case of functionality defeating form with amusing outcomes, possibilities and improbabilities in tow.
Radio stations east of the Mississippi start with a W while those west of the mighty river start with K.
If I tell you there’s a country station in Houston called KILT you can probably figure [...]