knowuhs sleepy brain

Hannah gave birth to our sweet lovely daughter Ada Beatrice Paessel on February 1st at 11:58 in the morning. It was magical. She weighed seven pounds and one ounce. She was 19.5 inches long.

Everyone is very happy and healthy. I am totally in love with this little cutie-pie.

We are keeping a seperate blog for Ada, over at our family blog Please check that out for more pictures, and adventures in parenting.

i just added two new pieces of software to versiontracker and macupdate.

i added the snowflake screen saver, and also my first windows software ever, the win version of flipbook-sender

i also rearranged my software page, and become a ‘technorati’ member. here apparently, is the link to my Technorati Profile

Hmn. Lets see what all the fuss is about.

as the weather in new england gets colder, i am put in mind of the winter holidays: kristmas, kwanza, khanuka. also the great snow-flake-a-thon at the mit media lab in the winter of 2005. i am working on a new screen saver to celebrate. you can download this pre-release screen saver from my software page.

(UPDATED): I just added a few more features to the screen saver: It now uses preference panel, and has better polygon code for better looking snowflakes!

today hannah and i have decided to launch our secret project: flipbooker.com, an online service that lets you create custom flip-books from your home videos.

you can help us spread the word!

• check out the site, and order a book!
• tell your friends about it
• write a blog entry about it
• post it to your favorite social bookmarking site:
  
  

  post to delicious
  digg it

• send us some feedback!

the idea comes from software i wrote a while ago. lots of people downloaded the software, but i am not sure how many people cut out the frames and stapled things together. this website is for people who want flip-books in a hurry, without having to work too hard.

I got started on this project this morning when I read this article by Thomas Sowell. It said something about how even though Ronald Reagan cut tax rates, he saw unprecedented tax revenues during his term. (It turns out that every president can also make the claim that they saw unprecedented tax revenue).

The exact quote from the article is:

One of the apparently invincible fallacies of our times is the belief that President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts caused the federal budget deficits of the 1980s. In reality, the federal government collected more tax revenue in every year of the Reagan administration than had ever been collected in any year of any previous administration.

I was surprised to learn that:

• Taxation and spending increases are constant over time, at least for the last 20 years.
• There was a (small) federal deficit before Reagan.
• Tax and Spending grows significantly faster than the population increases.

I plotted this myself with data from the US Dept. of the Census and historical tables from the Budget reports of the US government.

These numbers do not take into account inflation (because I am too lazy) – this could be a large factor, especially in data from the late 1970’s.