Outside the Beltway

Greg Mankiw notes a curious revisionism in Barney Frank’s pronouncements on Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

Once the province of science fiction, a car that can drive itself is now a reality, thanks to Google and DARPA. The implications are mind boggling.

Has modern life robbed America’s youth of their ability to think? Or simply caused them to think in different ways about different things?

Christine O’Donnell is buying ads on posts arguing that the party screwed itself by voting for her in yesterday’s Republican primary.

Despite constantly hiring more examiners, the patent application backlog is 728,044 and it takes 6 years to get a decision.

Google will now display and adjust search results as you type. This should be a boon to searchers and a terror to website operators, who live at the mercy of Google.

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart is suffering a little New Media embarrassment after writing a blog post based on comments by a Congressman who doesn’t exist.

It’s getting harder and harder to tell blogs from newspapers.

Fareed Zakaria argues that the fact al Qaeda has not launched a major attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 proves we overreacted to those attacks. I beg to differ.

Four news items and articles about China that have caught my eye.

Firefox 4 Beta doesn’t work well with Gmail, or at least Gmail as I have it configured with various Google Labs add-ons like “Send & Archive.”

Technology guru Leo Laporte had been using Google Buzz to aggregate his social media presence for a few weeks and discovered that his feed had stopped going out and discovered that nobody gave a damn.

Wired proclaims, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” It’s great linkbait but completely wrongheaded.

A mere thirty years after the Rubik’s Cube craze died out, a team of math geeks has proven once and for all that the puzzle can be solved in 20 moves or less from any position.

According to health inspectors in Portland, Oregon, this little girl is potentially a threat to your health and safety.

Google has an inordinate amount of information about you and your circle of friends.

My SiteMeter statistics have suddenly become much less useful. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Congress has been wrestling with the net neutrality issue for years. Two major players may force a decision soon.

Google now lets you sign in to multiple accounts in a single browser.

According to Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama’s biggest problem is that there are too many white people in this picture.

Newt Gingrich says that because there are no churches in Riyadh, we shouldn’t allow a mosque in New York.

Biden got hammered by the FEC for violating campaign finance rules. A big fining deal?

Is Google manipulating its search results to keep competitors down? And does its market dominance mean the government should step in?

Pakistan is the world-wide leader in internet porn searches. And they have some strange tastes over there.

Why I didn’t talk to Dave Weigel before writing about him.

The top 100 sites on the Internet get more than the next 900 combined.

Google is getting serious about launching a Facebook competitor. Is it too late?