My food-stamps page is getting a surge of traffic from Google+ this afternoon, and some of my readers are in space! Take a look at this screenshot from Google Analytics Real-Time:

I don’t think there are 41 people on the Space Station, so perhaps it has been capture by aliens whose first order of business is to read my blog. Seems plausible.

More likely, it’s a bug in Google Analytics Real-Time, which at a minimum has a gigantic memory leak. Leave it running, and look at your memory usage and you will see what I mean. Or just wait a couple of hours for it to crash.

Well, it is April 1st, so I suppose it’s just Google having a little fun.

Update: right around the time I posted this, Google fixed the memory leak, so now you can leave Google Analytics Real-Time running without having to reboot it every couple of hours.

That’s a California utility truck driving off of an Air Force C-5 Galaxy transport plane in New York. How cool is that? Finally, some nation-building here at home.

Rudy Giuliani was just on CNBC, and mentioned that New York City employs 35,000 police officers. And that is 10,000 more than the number of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, as estimated by NATO back in January 2011.

I wonder if we have whittled down those 25,000 Taliban troops at all since then. And how much does it cost to kill one Taliban? Given all the money we have spent, it’s got to be something absurd, like a million dollars a head, right? Of course, if you did wipe them out, then *poof* go the war profits…

I heard people talking about what sounded like “colob.” But when I googled it, a bunch of weird stuff came up. Turns out that the proper spelling is “Kolob” and Kolob is a Mormon star or planet; they don’t seem to be agreed upon which.

Since there is a Mormon running for president, Mitt Romney, I’m guessing that there will be quite a few people typing “What is Colob?” into Google. And if you just did that, try it again with a “K” or just go straight to the Wikipedia Kolob page.

If you subscribe to this blog via Google Reader, you may see three “ghost posts” in the list: “Ghost Bank”, “Don’t Mess with the US”, and “40 Acres of Sand and a Camel”. Those are all drafts, which were accidentally published and then unpublished. WordPress has an “interface bug” where your draft posts look just like published posts, and the “Publish” button is retitled to “Update” after a post is published. So, it is very easy to accidentally click “Publish” instead of “Save” on a draft after making an edit. So, that’s what happened.

In addition to that, the Googlebot monitors this site very closely. It pounces seconds after I hit the “Publish” button and adds the post to your RSS feed. And finally, Google Reader freezes posts in carbonite, Han Solo style. So, once it is in your feed, you will never see any edits made to it, and it will still be there even if it is taken down.