The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Being a well-groomed owner and operator of a goatee and sideburns, I take an interest in good shaving systems. I use a Remington Precision Titanium moustache and beard trimmer,

and have a mysteriously multiplying set of Gillette Mach 3 razors (one

of which I really bought for the free multi-bit screwdriver that got

included with it), which gives a pretty nice shave. I’m not terribly

satisfied with electric shavers, and the electified version of the Mach

3 — the M3 Power — seems like nothing more than a “plausible deniability vibrator” to me.

In 2004, after the introduction of the Schick Quattro, with which Schick heated up the razor blade arms race by creating a four-blade razor, The Onion published one of their joke editorials titled Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades, supposedly written by the CEO of Gillette. It turned out to be their most prescient piece since Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over: the Gillette Fusion has not only five blades, but an extra one for fine shaping work.

Not being one to miss such a trend or its implications, The Economist has an article titled The Cutting Edge that suggests that there’s an analogue to Moore’s Law for razors, meaning that we should have 14-blade systems by 2100. If only I could live long enough to see those glorious times.

This photo amuses me every time I see it. Click it to get the full-size version, suitable for desktop wallpaper.

Almost as stilted as her scenes with Hayden Christensen.

Here in Canada, we vote in our federal elections using a paper ballot that is standardized across the country; aside from the candidate names, the ballot looks the same no matter where you vote (for more details, see this entry). While this requires a manual counting system, it also has the added benefit of it being much harder to tamper with the results.

In the US, balloting systems vary by region: some ballots are on paper, either marked by hand or punched by voting machine, but some votes are purely electronic. The problem with the electronic systems as they are currently implemented is that they don’t leave a paper trail.

Manufacturers of electronic voting machines like Diebold insist that it’s too hard to add a paper trail system to these machines. This is a bit of a curiosity, considering that Diebold also manufactures ATMs, which are capable of provide paper receipts for each transaction and since cash registers have been able to keep a paper log of everything for decades. It’s also troubling, as voting machine manufacturers have meddled with standards organizations and Diebold’s CEO is active in partisan fundraising (he once wrote in a campaign pitch to Republicans that his company was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president”).

The blog Black Box Voting covers this issue regularly. Their most recent entry has a great graphic taken from the Washington Post — it compares Las Vegas slot machines with voting machines. Which one’s the bigger gamble?