…to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn…we will defeat you.   Puppy power.

Lawrence Callahan of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation said Hanson told him that after he sneezed, “the next thing he knew he was in the river.”

• Chuck Norris can borrow at the discount window
• Chuck Norris can sell $300bln in high yield loans before lunch
• Chuck Norris’s curves are never inverted
• Chuck Norris doesn’t hedge . He waits.
• Chuck Norris doesn’t target inflation. He roundhouse-kicks it until it begs for mercy.
• The Chuck Norris dollar buys 3 Canadian dollars, and trades at parity with the euro.
• Chuck Norris doesn’t supply collateral, only collateral damage.
• The tears of Chuck Norris would supply enough liquidity to solve the credit crisis. Too bad he never cries.
• When the yield on a Chuck Norris bond goes up, the price also rises.
• Chuck Norris trades on fear and greed simultaneously.
• Alan Greenspan calls Chuck Norris “The Maestro.”
• Chuck Norris has already banked his dividend payment from Northern Rock Plc.
• Chuck Norris doesn’t borrow at the Fed’s discount window. Chuck Norris LENDS at the Fed’s discount window.
• There is no market regulator. Just a list of securities Chuck Norris allows to be traded.
• Chuck Norris doesn’t buy gold to hedge against inflation. Gold buys Chuck Norris to hedge against inflation.
• Chuck Norris charges the Bank of England a penalty rate for borrowing – And guarantees its deposits.
• Chuck Norris gets ALL of his funding from the asset-backed commercial paper market.
• Chuck Norris doesn’t mark-to-market. The market marks to Chuck Norris.
• When the U.S. economy sneezes, the world catches a cold. When Chuck Norris sneezes, the U.S. economy catches pneumonia.
• Chuck Norris thinks Credit Crunch is a breakfast cereal.
• Chuck Norris isn’t a market maker; he IS the market.
• Chuck Norris subprime collateralized debt obligations still trade at 100 percent of face value.

Thanks, BJ!

The best part is that this song played at my wedding reception! I wonder how many guests thought of the video?

The city will use the DNA database it is building to match feces to a registered dog and identify its owner.

Owners who scoop up their dogs’ droppings and place them in specially marked bins on Petah Tikva’s streets will be eligible for rewards of pet food coupons and dog toys.

But droppings found underfoot in the street and matched through the DNA database to a registered pet could earn its owner a municipal fine.

Hopefully, this will be my last dog-poop-related post for a while.  Speaking of which, it’s time for Layla’s walk!

Under the pilot plan, announced this week, Sunset Scavenger will place biodegradable bags and what are tastefully called dog-waste carts in a popular San Francisco dog park. The dog poo will then be put into a methane digester, where bacteria will eat away at it for two weeks before it turns into methane gas. The gas can then be used to power appliances such as cookers and heaters that currently run on natural gas. It can also be used to generate electricity.

The best part about the article is that it highlights several problems that I have discussed with Katie in the past few months regarding Seattle’s bag tax.  Namely, if the 20-cent tax per plastic bag at a grocery store goes through, what do the dog owners do if those same bags were helping them comply with the dog-waste pick-up laws?  We may just see more poop going un-picked-up, who knows?  Of course, the (debateably) environmentally proper way to dispose of dog-waste is to get it into the toilet, but as most pet owners know, there’s rarely a toilet handy on your walks.  (Another way would be to compost it yourself, but there are issues of remaining bacteria getting into your vegetables or even the water supply if you do this.)

I’m wondering how much it would cost San Francisco or Seattle to provide smaller versions of these “dog-waste carts” and biodegradeable bags every few blocks throughout the city.  We already have public trash cans, public recycle bins, etc.  Why not another small bin next to it that can possibly yield some extra methane power?

“What’s interesting and surprising in our results is that the same system we spend years trying to acquire in school, and that we use to send a man to the moon, and that has inspired the likes of Plato, Einstein and Stephen Hawking, has something in common with what a rat is doing when it’s out hunting for food,” [Justin Halberda] said. “I find that deeply moving.”

Behind every great leap of our computational mind lies the pitter-patter of rats’ feet, the little squeak of rodent kind.

My hope is that math educators can harness this relationship in a meaningful way in the future.  The article also has a version of the test used in one of the cited studies here.  See what your high score is!

The patrol, which has been wearing the peaked hats and distinctive bow ties for about 70 years, recently was named America’s “Best-Dressed State Law Enforcement Agency” by the National Association of Uniform Manufacturers and Distributors.

Link to the article.