The World According To PTK

Here's how I stopped the flickering pointer in Windows Explorer on my Vista PC with a Radeon HD 4850 video card : Right click on the Computer icon on the desktop, choose Properties > Device Manager > Sound, video and game controllers. Right click on ATI HDMI Audio and choose Disable. Restart the computer, and the flickering is gone.

I appreciate the fact that when I was reading an article in the New York Times and listening to Pandora radio just now, the Google Chrome browser didn't totally melt down when Flash blew up in the Pandora window. Instead, Chrome let me know that Flash had crashed, and I was able to close the Pandora window and keep reading the Times. It's just like Google told me it would be. Plus, I keep switching over to Chrome lately because it doesn't insist on soaking up more and more memory over time like Firefox does. I love Firefox, but jeez, does it have to keep grabbing 350 megs just to run four of five windows? You'd think they could fix this, but the problem persists for years. By the way, another example that Obama is a genius: he appoints a Nobel Prize winning scientist to head the  Department of Energy, Steven Chu. This is probably a better idea than picking people who you happen to know from around the neighborhood or something. Lastly, Pandora is genius at draining m...

Another excellent On Point episode from WBUR in Boston. This one is about the danger to US national security of cyber attacks .

On the way home from work I stopped by the library to pick up a book I ordered last week, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the World's Smartest Person in the World , by A. J. Jacobs. It's about the author's quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. First, I feel compelled to say that if you're not taking advantage of the fact that you get to use your library membership to order books online and have them dropped off at your local branch, do it! Start doing it right away. I contend that this is the second most crucial use of my tax dollars, after paying firemen. A blurb by P. J. O'Rourke, found on the back of the book: " The Know-It-All is a terrific book. It's a lot shorter than the encyclopedia, and funnier, and you'll remember more of it. Plus, if it falls off the shelf onto your head, you'll live." [Hours later, about fifty-nine minutes of which I spent replying to my grandmother's email, the rest, I'm n...

Here's an article in The Economist about an economist giving volunteer financial literacy training to homeless women in New York City. I don't know if that sounds very entertaining to read, but it was. Also, I notice that the name of my blog is The World According to PTK, and yet all I'm doing is linking to things I'm reading, without doing much in the way of summarizing or commenting. I have an excuse ready: the more I read, especially these days, the less I know what to think. Here's something else to check out in The Economist, from last week, one of the best overviews I have seen of the actions taken by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to ward off financial market meltdown .

In Barack Obama's essay, " Renewing American Leadership ," published in the July/August 2007 edition of Foreign Affairs, he lays out in detail his goals for US foreign policy. He believes (and so do I) that the world needs strong, enlightened American leadership. These are words written by a highly educated, intelligent, rational and forward-looking man, and reading them will likely make you thankful that America had the good sense to elect him as our next president.

I'm reading Colossus: The Price of America's Empire , by Niall Ferguson. It's a good overview of US foreign policy from the late 19th century forward, and takes the view that the world needs an empire for stability, and though the US is the only candidate to fulfill this role, it embraces the position reluctantly.

The AP reports today: "Benchmark crude fell as low as $49.75 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, levels last seen on May 18, 2005, when oil hit $46.80 a barrel." Oil for less than $50. That happened fast. Four months ago it was $147, so it's fallen by about two-thirds in a very short amount of time. Also, unemployment hit a 16-year high last month, and the four-week average is at a 25-year high.

I recommend the public radio show On Point , and public radio in general. Check out these world energy consumption statistics from the Energy Information Administration -- Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government.