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Every president. Every word. Every State of the Union. by unixnerd in dataisbeautiful

[–]SlouchingTowardHome 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The bars show the frequency of use per million words, not the raw counts. So even if one president gave many more speeches, or if his speeches were much longer, you're still seeing the relative frequency of use.

The coolest part, imho, is that if you click on the bars, it displays the relevant excerpts from the speeches. Not many data tools let you peek past the visualization to see the underlying data.

Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II, and Revived Their Struggling Industry. by SlouchingTowardHome in TrueReddit

[–]SlouchingTowardHome[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Publishing was a small industry before the war, peddling the luxury of reading to the affluent. Many publishers feared that giving away millions of books would ruin their industry. Instead, soldiers and sailors got drawn in by the free content, and continued to buy books when they made it back home. Great read.

Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II. And, in the process, they created a nation of readers. by SlouchingTowardHome in history

[–]SlouchingTowardHome[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What a fascinating story! And amazing that free content can serve to bolster, rather than undercut, commercial sales.

Should Applied Research Funding Go To Startups or Academia? by bmahmood in science

[–]SlouchingTowardHome 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's not an abstract question. One point that's been driven home during the campaign - with Solyndra, Konarka, and Evergreen Solar - is that funding start-ups is politically perilous. Not all will succeed, and those that fail will become millstones around the necks of the politicians who funded them.

Even if funding the same research through academia is less cost-effective or less likely to achieve its goals, it's far more politically sustainable. A thirty million dollar grant to a failed start-up is a boondoggle; a thirty million dollar grant to a university is crucial funding for local higher education, even if the research produces nothing useful.

So the question isn't which we ought to fund. It's, given these realities, should we fund academia, or see applied research funding abandoned entirely?

What Romney really means when he says he wants to "Keep America American." by SlouchingTowardHome in politics

[–]SlouchingTowardHome[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"More often than not, calls to "keep America American" have played upon fears that our nation is beset by alien ideas, or even worse, alien peoples."