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Using Firefox, many tabs open, my computer’s default state.

Eventually I open a Web page that has a badly written script that bogs down the browser and sometimes the whole computer and can’t be stopped or even identified.

I bookmark everything, close Firefox, kill the Firefox process in Windows Task Manager and reopen everything, login again, etc. Because this restart can take five or ten minutes and interrupts multiple things that I’m doing, I usually put up with erratic browser behavior until Firefox crashes or becomes unusable.

Why doesn’t Firefox isolate each tabbed window in its own thread or group of threads? That way, closing the tab with the runaway script would solve the problem. And why doesn’t Firefox provide a resource monitor to show the % of system resources being used by each tab, so that you can easily ID and close a problem tab? These seem to be the obvious questions.

I suspect that users are much more attuned to browser reliability than they used to be. We’re far removed from the days when PCs became unstable if you didn’t reboot them frequently and nobody used browsers for serious purposes. The programmers should make their browsers more robust as they’ve already done for operating systems.

UPDATE: This looks interesting. (There’s also this, which I remember seeing in book stores a long time ago.)

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I just picked up a $15 rice cooker at the same store where I once bought a very fine $8 toaster. Do I know value or what. But here is the thing. A rice cooker is passive — you put in the rice and water and turn it on and it does the rest. Do you even have to turn it off? I don’t think so. It just sits there, stewing. Sort of female-like. The cooked rice stimulates one’s appetite. It also takes a long time to get ready in the evening. Tradeoffs.

By contrast, the pressure cooker is a powerful machine. Masculine. It functions well, if not quite coolly, under stress. It makes noise and exudes just a hint of danger. Some people are scared of it. But it gets the job done faster than anything else (brown rice, 20 minutes, QED). Like the Browning M2 heavy machine gun it is sturdily constructed from highest-quality steels and requires an operator’s calm maturity and careful management for successful operation. Precision is important. You can use your massive Breitling (instruments for professional cooks) chronograph to time the broccoli as you would time an instrument approach in your Lockheed Constellation, with the enormous Turbo Compound engines going pocketa pocketa pocketa. Truth be told, I have been a pressure-cooker man for many years, ever since my mom gave me one as a gift.

So, I am wondering if going the rice-cooker way is a beta move. Certainly some things will be easier. But where is the adventure? Also, all that testosterone is making me impatient — I don’t know if I can wait twice as long for my cooked rice.

It may be time to plunge deep into manly culinary risk-taking by buying an electric turkey fryer.

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A helpful chart.

(Via Chart Porn.)

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I put up a post a couple of weeks ago about the BlogAds survey of blog readers.

Now there’s an updated graphic from BlogAds, based on data from the same survey, providing information about liberal/conservative blog readers’ positions on some questions that weren’t addressed in the initial survey report:

There certainly are some strong patterns here, not that this comes as a shock to anyone. (Of course my caveat about self-selected data samples applies to these results as it did to the initial results.)

(Chicago Boyz is a BlogAds affiliate.)

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Via sportsman extraordinaire Dan from Madison, this fascinating video shows the operations of a British bicycle factory in 1945. If the factory shown is not a composite it may be the Raleigh works in Nottingham. (The video shows Rudge branded bike frames being made. Wikipedia says that the electronics — now music — company EMI bought the Rudge name and produced bikes from 1935 until 1943 when they sold the brand to Raleigh.)

The video was a promotional effort on behalf of British industry. In hindsight it shows British industry on the cusp of postwar decline. But that’s hindsight. The bicycles shown are pre-war designs, variations of which are still used in much of the world. (Many of the bikes shown in the video would have been exported, perhaps mainly to what are now the Commonwealth countries.) Updated versions of these bikes were popular in the USA until the 1970s when they began to be superseded by more modern designs. Since then the Raleigh brand has passed through multiple acquisitions, and Raleigh bicycles are no longer made in Britain (I have no idea when the Rudge brand was last used).

Increased wealth and the automobile eventually killed off most demand for bicycles as routine transportation in developed countries. The video shows crowds of English people in business dress, including at least one woman in heels, cycling about. Nowadays most of them would drive or take buses or trains (even if, as I suspect is the case in the video, they work for a bicycle manufacturer). But in the hard times of 1945 the bicycle would have been the best short-distance travel option for many Britons and Europeans. And in Britain’s post-war socialist austerity the bicycle industry, like every other British industry, needed all the help it could get.
 

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Tonight will be the occasion of a “super Moon”, which seems to be a term used by people who know a lot about the Moon to denote a full Moon that coincides with the Moon’s closest passage to Earth in its elliptical orbit. Cosmophobia aside, there is no reason to be alarmed. However, some Chicagoboyz are finding it necessary to shave more frequently than usual, and if you have a hot date tonight it might be a good idea to pack a disposable razor with your breath mints. Don’t let that stubble become any trouble. (I’m not sure if this advice applies to the ladies as well.)

Anyway, the Moon will rise tonight at around sundown and will be low in the sky through twilight, which should make it particularly nice to look at (assuming the sky is clear) and photograph. I’ve been using the free desktop version of this app and it works very well. You specify your location and the date and it tells you the times and locations relative to the horizon of sunrise/sunset and moonrise/moonset.

If you photograph it, use your longest lens or zoom extension, try to rest the camera on something solid, and start photographing when the Moon is low in the sky. Ideally you will be able to catch the Moon early enough in the twilight that the Moon’s brightness does not overwhelm your background.

UPDATE: You may notice that we have capitalized the word Moon, following NASA’s practice rather than NPR’s. This is because we assume that in matters of astronomical grammar NASA probably knows best. Also we don’t want to offend any Islamists.

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Chicagoboyz community member John Wolfsberger, Jr. emails:

I actually feel some sympathy for Elizabeth Warren. She was a law professor, unfairly besieged by the republican War on Women (TM), apparently sitting alone in the faculty lounge. In an effort to meet new people and make some friends, she decided to make herself more interesting by revealing her Native American Ancestry. She really did nothing wrong.
 
However, the incident has led me to an interesting insight. Ms. Warren tells us she is 1/32 Native American based on her great, great, great grandmother being Cherokee. For simplicity sake, let’s refer to her as the g3 grandmother. It occurred to me that if two of her g4 grandparents had been Cherokee, but parents of different g3 grandparents, Ms. Warren could still be considered 1/32 Native American. Furthermore, if 4 of Ms. Warrens g5 grandparents had been Native American, and parents of different g4 grandparents, Ms. Warren would still be 1/32 Native American. And so on.
 
That insight led me to a bit of research. Homo ergaster, the forerunner of Homo Sapiens (which is all of us) left Africa between 1.8 and 1.3 million years ago. Taking the nominal value as 1.5 million years, and assuming 20 years per generation, that means my (roughly) g75,000 grandparents were ALL African. True, more recent ancestors lived in Bavaria, the Vorarlberg and Ireland, but they were ALL African as well, by THEIR (roughly) g74,997 grandparents.
 
Since every single one of my ancestors was African, shouldn’t I be able, a la Ms. Warren, to claim minority status as an African American? And if I can, shouldn’t everyone else in the United States be able to as well, regardless of where their more recent ancestors resided for a time?
 
This seems eminently reasonable. There is only one issue to resolve: if we all belong to the exact same Victim Group (TM), who’s the oppressor group?

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Richard Epstein:

So what next? The best first step is to free up labor markets world wide. Specifically, we need policies that take aim at the unbearable political forces that seek to tighten the regulatory noose on voluntary labor markets.
 
Unfortunately, the dominant attitude of macroeconomists is to assume that nothing that takes place within the labor market (of which Krugman never speaks) is large enough to influence the large macro trends to which they attribute today’s high employment rates.
 
The blunt truth is exactly the opposite. The calcification of labor markets is the primary impediment to economic recovery. The direct effects of government regulation of labor can matter far more than the indirect effects of macroeconomic policy, whether Keynesian or austerity-based. Neither austerity nor lavish public expenditures will improve the overall situation, which is why the massive increase in American public debt has not nudged unemployment rates down. The only workable solution has to stress job creation, not by misdirected subsidies, but by dismantling the government obstacles to market exchange.

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A couple of high-quality links that come to me from people I know and that may be of interest to Chicagoboyz readers:

-Beat The Stockmarket’s Blog looks to be very good on, of course, markets and trading. Check it out.

-To see a truly interactive magazine at play, check out RC Pilot (there’s a free demo at the link). I find the content extremely interesting overall despite my low level of interest in radio-controlled models per se. There is a lot of good aviation content inside, and RC technology is increasingly relevant WRT drones and other hot topics. You will probably like RCP if you are any kind of technophile.

(I’m going to permalink these sites for future reference.)

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The results of a survey of blog readers taken by the BlogAds company. (Some of the survey questions are still running in the upper left sidebar of Chicago Boyz.) The people who responded to the survey are self-selected and it’s not clear how big the sample is, but the results are interesting and worth a click.

(Chicago Boyz is a BlogAds affiliate, in case this is not obvious.)

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Anuchit Sundarakiti Photography

(via @CarlosAlvarez37 on Twitter)