Where does it end?

The largest opposition party in Poland, Law and Justice, has recently published a pamphlet titled Report on the State of the Republic. For my readers' amusement, I quote a brief passage from this document:

Passenger train transportation is in an abysmal state, as the government has allowed for a situation in which two Polish railroad companies (Intercity and Local Railways) are forced to compete with one another.

The horror! Competition can be a good thing but we all know there have to be some limits, or else we're on a slippery slope to Darwinian capitalist anarchy. A Polish company having to compete with another Polish company, that's just perverse!

Nice RIDE

Do you like it when your life gets a lot better completely out of the blue? You probably do. That's the feeling I had when I discovered RStudio, a new (and free) IDE designed especially for R. I've never heard of it being in the works, hence the pleasant surprise. RStudio works really well and is pretty slick. But the absolute best of it for me is that it makes it so easy to use LaTeX due to the fact that it lets you compile Sweave documents directly into PDFs, with just one click. It's godsent, really. It's so great to have your output updated automatically every time you update your code, and without the previous hassle of trying to work Sweave from within R.

Below are some screenshots of what RStudio can do (the first one shows a simple Sweave document and the output derived from executing the R code within that document, and the second one is the result of compiling the Sweave file into PDF):

Jay-Z and the eurozone crisis

Four years ago there was a period in which the dollar was sharply losing value against the euro. In the eyes of some analysts at the time, the ultimate sign of dollar's inevitable demise was the fact that, in a contemporary video to his song, Jay-Z was flashing stacks of 500-euro bills.

Someone please let Jay-Z know that Ben Franklin called, and he wants an apology.

In other news, dog steals prescription drugs from man

Big prescription drug scandal in Poland: Pharmacies were illegally hoarding certain very expensive drugs that they were supposed to sell to customers at extremely low prices (set by the legislators), then selling those drugs to third parties which were afterwards re-selling them at market prices abroad. I love quotes from regulators how they were "very surprised" when they've uncovered the whole deal. I mean, what can possibly be more shocking than to see people taking advantage of huge arbitrage opportunities created by stringent price controls?

A striking paragraph

It's from a NYT Magazine article about Air France Flight 447.

She turned her head to watch the kids, then she said: "Children are amazing, you know? A psychologist told us after the accident that children do not have a sense of death until they are 6 or 7. And I radically contest this. When it happened, Jose was 4 years old. And of course, it’s a conversation I will never forget. I told him, 'Listen, there was an accident with Daddy’s plane, and he’s not coming home.' And he started crying as I never saw him cry before. He was saying, 'But there are so many things I wanted to make for him.' "