Happy Poisson d'Avril to all you merry pranksters! Check out the Museum of Hoax's Top 100 April Fool's Day pranks of all time. My favorite:

#7: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi

The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.

Trying to balance a looming dissertation, incessant rent payments, and taking care of my newborn - with at best two hours of consecutive sleep - has given me cause to realize that THF is unsustainable in its current incarnation. However, fret not dear readers as I have big plans for the 'future of hindsight'. You may notice some technical difficulties with the site over the next few weeks as I am rolling out the backend framework for the coming changes, but hopefully I will be able to pull back the veil sometime in March. In the meantime, feel free to go coo all over my lil' Matilda!

Although a federal judge has ordered the White House to backup their emails in compliance with the Federal Records Act, what assurances do we have that the job is getting done?  According to one source, the answer is very little.

Having now been forced to maintain adequate controls on electronic records preservation, the White House has tasked the Office of the Administration with the job alongside all assurances to the Judiciary and the American people that they have been "...taking steps to maintain and preserve backup tapes for the official e-mail system."

Putting aside the annoyances that it takes a federal judge to get the Executive Branch to comply with even the most minor oversight, archiving electronic records of such importance requires, to say the least, a well-managed system.  With literally millions of emails moving through White House servers, it is not enough to simply hit the 'archive' button on your email client but rather requires an intricate system of both digital and tape storage as well as solid geographical disbursement in order to minimize the risk of loss.  That is why these projects are normally outsourced to qualified professional third parties whose primary business is backup.

I have a trustworthy source in the company providing tech support to the Office of the Administration and he is far from impressed:

Like the article mentioned, they?re called the executive office of the president.  These guys are contractors and you can tell they're new to the job.  Everyone we deal with there are a bunch of morons.  They have no clue how to administer the unix box that networker (their backup software) is installed on or how to manage their backup media (tapes) or any aspect of what you need to know in order to ensure proper backups.  Needless to say they're a bit of a running joke around the office.

Is it really so wrong to expect those running the government to be among the best and brightest of their generation?

With each passing day, conventional wisdom is predicting a long road ahead for republican presidential hopefuls.  After a months-long and expensive primary race, there seems to be no clear frontrunner and the stakes are growing.  Can anyone think of a good reason to opt out of a prominent televised debate?

Key Republican leaders are encouraging the party's presidential candidates to rethink their decision to skip presidential debates focusing on issues important to minorities, fearing a backlash that could further erode the party's standing with black and Latino voters.

The leading contenders for the Republican nomination have indicated they will not attend the "All American Presidential Forum" organized by black talk show host Tavis Smiley, scheduled for Sept. 27 at Morgan State University in Baltimore and airing on PBS. Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) all cited scheduling conflicts in forgoing the debate. The top Democratic contenders attended a similar event in June at Howard University.

I'd like to know what prior engagements are so important that they would throw away the chance to get their message out there.  I'd also like to know why such conflicts seem to arise in tandem with minority forums.  But that's rhetorical - we all know that after six years of ignoring people of color, the GOP has all but abandoned any hope of recapturing their vote.  I guess Guliani, McCain, Thompson and the rest of the peanut gallery would rather not get caught on camera sputtering for creative platitudes.