A good way to put that in context is to compare it to the amount of oil the USA uses a day. The US Energy Information Administration says the USA in 2009 used 18,686,000 barrels of oil a day (chart).

(18,686,000 / 24) / 60 = 12,976 barrels a minute

40,000 leaking barrels a day / 12,976 = 3.08 or 3 minutes and 4.8 seconds

So while that’s a lot of oil, it’s only a small fraction of the oil we use a day. Even over the whole 47 days between April 20th and June 6th only 2 hours and 25 minutes of oil were spilled.

I’m not saying that it’s not a catastrophic disaster but every day we pollute by several magnitudes more and it’s good to keep these things in perspective.

The big question seems to be “why go black?” and “does it make a difference?“. These questions seem to just be a failure of imagination to me. It’s as if people are expecting the exact same movie with just a black lead. And to me that would be a tragedy.

Race matters and should have an effect on the story. Different cultures have different perspectives and viewing those through a prism of a well known tale is a great way to talk about those experiences. This is even more interesting as comics have oftain been a haven of white only characters and have made grave missteps trying to represent other cultures. Hollywood is obviously not the kindest to other cultures but still comes off as worldly compared to comic books.

I hope Donald gets the role and I hope it had a meaningful impact on the story. I hope it’s a success and has broader impact on comics and how we view races other then whites as lead roles.

It seem most people think of the sciences when it comes to the prize. Einstein figured out how the universe worked and then got a prize. He did something big and got an award. But that’s not how the the Nobel Prizes say they work. they say that they have always given prizes to people who have done good work or to people who are in a position to do good work and show promise. Until now I don’t think anyone has cared enough about the piece prize. But currently people are acutely aware of what Obama has done in his under a year in office.

Either way I think Obama handled it well. He’s humbled and hopes to do great work. I couldn’t agree more.

I am voting Yes and No.

Yes to the first question that seem like it will close a loophole in the law that lets the state take on debt without public approval.

No to the second question which would put more control to municipalities with join court systems when it come to choosing judges. This will probably stop more towns from joining court systems together (and thus cost more money) but all so lessens the impact corrupt apointies would have on local areas. I like my judges to have though a vetting process as possible and I think letting them go through the state senate would be best.

This is a good breakdown of Obama and McCain’s tax cuts. Are those tax brackets though? It doesn’t seem like it.

Either way the one bias the graphic has that I can see is the “average” at the bottom. Average of what? The bottom 60% has as much weight at the top 1% that makes no sense.

Lets refactor the averages and exclude the top 1% and I think we’ll get something that is a bit closer to a fair look at an average. A real average would have to take the population of each segment in to account but I think that math is beyond me.

After you remove the top 1% these are the new numbers are Obama gives an average 2.5% cut and McCain gives a 1.6% cut. While the numbers are close McCain’s cut clearly skew to the riches people while Obama’s skew to the poorest.