links for 2009-07-12

• How to Operate and Maintain a Difference Engine
• Ryan Avent: The California Effect
• Melissa McEwan on the New Republic.
  And as long as Marty Peretz is writing fetid dogshite like "Christian Believers Would Be Excluded From Government If The Left Liberals Had Their Way," I can't say it's likely that I will ever feel remotely inclined to change my mind.
• Ada Lovelace: Sketch of The Analytical Engine
• Making Light: Lovelace and Babbage
• Levi Johnston: Palin Resigned Because Of Money
• Donald Craig Mitchell: Sarah Palin: How she gained control and then lost it
• Tom Levenson: Does the string “Michael Kinsley” correspond to a sentient being? I think not… « The Inverse Square Blog
  [U]nless your definition of urgency requires a gun to your head with the hammer cocked, to believe that dealing with a problem that has grown steadily worse, is unsustainable in cost, and is killing people before their time is not urgent requires a certain Olympian disdain for grubby reality that I just can’t muster...
• Obsidian Wings: Gucci Little Piggies
• Obsidian Wings: John Yoo: Even Worse Than You Thought
• Obsidian Wings: Our Man in OLC
• Jeremy Siegel is not having a good year | The Big Picture
• Science has a well-known liberal bias - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
• Paul Krugman: Marginal thinking about fiscal stimulus
  it’s very hard to imagine what would lead you to say that $800 billion in stimulus, which leaves the economy deeply depressed, is just right. You could make a case that no stimulus at all — in fact, fiscal retrenchment — is appropriate. Or you could, like me, call for substantially more. But ratifying what we’ve done, and no more, makes very little sense