Remember high school science? Remember Archimedes? As the story goes, about 2,250 years ago, he noticed that the water in his bath rose higher in the tub when he submerged his body. We're pretty sure he wasn't the first to notice this (otherwise those ancient Greeks spent a heck of a lot of time mopping up water from the floor). But Archimedes took the observation a step further, and started talking about "displacement," and its value for measuring an object's volume.

Some days ago, we featured thoughts from Charles Harvey, Nevada’s Recovery Act director, about his state and the stimulus.

We’ve written about the headaches associated with the supplemental SWCAP process that states must use in order to recover some of their costs associated with administering federal stimulus dollars. But we thought that given the importance of this issue to the states, a little more background was in order. We turned to Clark Partridge, the helpful state comptroller in Arizona to take us through the story.

All the money going to states for the federal stimulus needs to be managed, tracked, and reported. That oversight costs money. The federal government did come up with one means for recovering some of that overhead. But the states aren’t all so happy about it. The so-called supplemental Statewide Cost Allocation Plan, or SWCAP (it rhyme with skycap) allows states to shift a portion of the programmatic federal funds they receive to cover the cost of administering those funds. It’s not a huge chunk of cash: only one-half of one-percent of the total spending.

Curiously, sometimes having more money available for an entitlement program – through ARRA, for example –  can actually mean that while access improves, quality of service declines on certain measures.

The GAO has documented that almost 90 percent of homes set to be weatherized are subject to historical preservation review. Whether or not they had that startling number in front of them, officials in Michigan’s  State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) saw that they were confronting an enormous obstacle to getting weatherization money out. In Michigan alone, 34,000 homes would be affected and would need review.

We wanted to catch you up on two important reports about the stimulus that came out of the Inspector General community  in recent weeks.