“Camera maker Kodak has said it will sue Apple and Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of the iPhone and Blackberry, over technology used in their handsets.” Whatever, I’m just waiting for the countersuit. Why is the tech industry wasting time with these circular-firing-squad lawsuits? To me, this is a clear sign of the growing irrelevance and danger of the current IP protection regime.
“Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine are running an experiment in a service station to count the number of people who wash their hands. They have got an infra-red beam on the door to the toilets, and sensors on the soap dispensers. The results are automatically sent to their computers. In 2008 about 30% of the men visiting the facilities used the soap dispensers, while last year, when the experiment re-started six weeks after the pandemic in Mexico, hand washing was at 45%, Dr Schmidt notes. “Hand washing then went up throughout July and August, and peaked at 57%.”
BBC News - The clean hands mission
These numbers are DISTRESSINGLY LOW, can I say.
“A US study of 12 to 18-year-olds found those with bedtimes after midnight were 24% more likely to have depression than those who went to bed before 2200. And those who slept fewer than five hours a night had a 71% higher risk of depression than those who slept eight hours, the journal Sleep reports.”
BBC News - Earlier bedtime ‘cuts teenage depression’
Fond memories of TJ, ha.
An insightful Washington Post op-ed that’ll appear in print in the Outlook section this Sunday.
His points, stated briefly:
1. Terrorism is not the biggest threat you’re facing right now, so chill the fuck out.
2. Offense is a lousy defense.
3. Our borders will never serve as a meaningful line of defense against terrorism.
4. Technology is not necessarily our savior.
5. You and me are probably a better defense against terrorism than air marshals. There are more of us.
Not that I expect the national dialogue to reflect any of this.
Etherpad is dead; Google bought it and brought the devs onto Wave. :( So I guess we can all start using that, now. beWeeVee looks like an interesting alternative, though it requires Silverlight.
kiosk sent this out in an email, i wanted to give it a url so i could tag it in delicious, where i (naturally) keep my recipes; they sound interesting! anyway kiosk is an amazing store and you should support them especially if you are looking for slightly-off-the-beaten-path sorts of gifts. recipe follows:
Maringoon
Preheat oven to 350
2 egg whites at room temperature
1/ 4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sifted confectioners sugar
5 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup coconut flakes
1 1/2 cups of corn flakes
Combine the first three ingredients until stiff but not dry
Gradually add the sifted sugar
Beat until stiff and satiny
Fold in chocolate chips, coconut and cornflakes
Drop by teaspoon onto well greased cookie sheet or baking paper
Cook for 12 - 15 minutes
TIP! Do not make on a rainy day, has to be low humidity or they do
not turn out right!
“The norte chico is also home to La Silla, one of the most important observatories in the world, because the air there is so clear that no star—either dead or yet to be born—escapes the eye of its gigantic telescope. Apropos of the observatory, someone who has worked there for three decades told me that the most renowned astronomers in the world wait years for their turn to scour the universe. I commented that it must be stupendous to work with scientists whose eyes are always on infinity and who live detached from earthly miseries, but he informed me that it is just the opposite: astronomers are as petty as poets. He says they fight over jam at breakfast. The human condition never fails to amaze.”
Hey You Guys
Circlesquarethis is it.
this is us.
here we go.
(it’s a good song; i love their album, apparently the circlesquare guy is from vancouver? of course he lives in — wait for it — berlin, now, like everyone else who has ever been cool. i think berlin is where cool people go when they die. it’s a conspiracy.)
“Swiss voters have supported a referendum proposal to ban the building of minarets, official results show.”
NEWS FLASH: Tolerant, liberal northern Europe potentially even more terribly racist, xenophobic than us. Again.
“PART I. ADMINISTRATION OF THE GOVERNMENT
TITLE XIV. PUBLIC WAYS AND WORKS CHAPTER
89. LAW OF THE ROAD
Chapter 89: Section 3. Sleigh or sled; bellsSection 3. No person shall travel on a way with a sleigh or sled drawn by a horse, unless there are at least three bells attached to some part of the harness.
”
Au Revoir Simone - Anywhere You Looked
I love so many things about this song. Where do I even begin? Maybe it’s the lush synthesizers. Maybe it’s the retro drum kicks. Maybe it’s the contrast between the frenzied percussion and the song’s relatively languid bassline. Maybe it’s the sweetly validating lyrics — especially how they change up the chorus between verses (for which, for the record, I am a huge sucker).
It’s about half as long as I wish it was, though. Easily one of my faves from their album.
“College students and single noncollege adults defined the term date, differentiated dates from going out with a friend, and described their reasons for going on their most recent first date. Responses indicate that single adults vary more in their orientation toward dating (e.g., an emphasis on a lifelong relationship) than do college students. Sex differences in first date goals appeared only in the college sample. College men were more likely to report sexual goals, whereas college women were more likely to report goals reflecting friendship, date-to-date, and having fun. Results highlight the importance of several forms of uncertainty reduction, shed light on an application of predicted outcome value theory, and suggest that the nature of commitment may differ across age groups.”
“Online petitions, used by good online organizers, are great. Example: At MoveOn, 10 local citizens often show up at a member of Congress’s office to do a media event holding them accountable on some issue. 10 citizens alone are not usually newsworthy. 10 local citizens delivering petitions on behalf of 3000 local citizens — newsworthy. It works over and over. And media stories are a great form of pressure.”
“DejaMenu will display the current application’s main menu as a context menu when a key combination is pressed. This is particularly useful for people using multiple monitors. Since the Menubar only appears on a single monitor, it is awkward to use applications on a different monitor. DejaMenu solves this - just press the configured key combo, and a copy of the Menubar is right there for your to use.”
This is a stupid hack and I resent having to use it, though I’m glad that it exists. Why can’t Apple let me just render the menubar on more than one monitor?
“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”
“anyway, i’m making a record, as previously blathered about, and this means that my horrible, useless website is getting redone by my friend sonya. i mean, it sucks, which was my choice. i was like “can this look more horrible?” i wish i was kidding, but i happen to like crap. i just do. but she’s promised to work with me to make sure it’s still unwieldy and awkward, which is good preparation for everything else lcdish, and i promise to be less grumpy about things actually being “useful”. it’s just that things that are too “useful”… well, i don’t entirely trust them. i kind of like useless things. for instance—and this is a pretty facile and simplified metaphor here—art is useless, and nazis made lots of useful things. i like dumb meandering things that make me happy and confused, and don’t particularly like “effective marketing tools designed for maximum accurate data capture” blah blah blah. it all sounds so sad and functional. i don’t like the idea of people sitting in a room talking about the best way to word things to get the right reaction from a base of “users” etc. i don’t like thinking that those people used to love to do something, or wanted to be something, and would up measuring the best way to manipulate other people. i honestly don’t judge them, but i feel weird, and sort of sad—not FOR them, in a pitying way, as i have no idea how they fell, for fuck’s sake, and i’m a ridiculous person by the measure of a pretty deep cut of the population—but ABOUT them.”
the internet - lcd soundsystem’s MySpace Blog |
it’s a good thing you don’t have to be able to get along with someone to enjoy their music.
“Though Glenn Beck fervently proclaimed his affinity for Muse’s apocalyptic glam stylings last month, it was hard to figure out where the worlds of the conservative talker and the British prog rockers could meet. And because Beck is often purposely outrageous, it’s also hard to tell how much of what he says he believes himself and when he’s simply stirring the pot for the sake of good TV or radio. But we now know one thing for sure: When Beck claimed a few weeks ago that Muse’s people insisted he stop raving on about how much he loves the group’s new album, The Resistance, he was making a funny.”
“The shared forum of television is an arena for the declaration and confirmation of the “reality” of events. Protests, scandals, and disasters that have not been reported on radio and television do not seem to have “happened.” The Watergate scandals became “real,” not when the Washington Post reported the stories, but when network television news reported that the Washington Post reported the stories.”
“Besides, it isn’t as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock. Most people peak in terms of legibility in 4th grade, Graham said.”
“On the demand side, exporters and strategic planners focusing on unworked glass in balls, rods, or tubes excluding microspheres less than 1 mm in diameter in New Zealand face a number of questions. Which countries are supplying unworked glass in balls, rods, or tubes excluding microspheres less than 1 mm in diameter to New Zealand? How important is New Zealand compared to others in terms of the entire global and regional market? How much do the imports of unworked glass in balls, rods, or tubes excluding microspheres less than 1 mm in diameter vary from one country of origin to another in New Zealand?”
“I believe that creating meaningless clutter, promoting low-quality products, or talking about things you don’t actually care about on the Internet is littering, and that it affects both your social karma and your social capital, even if you don’t tell your friends about it.”
“In line with the halo associated with green consumerism, people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green than conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products. … Because purchasing green products affirms individuals’ values of social responsibility and ethical consciousness, we predict that purchasing green products will establish moral credentials, ironically licensing selfish and morally questionable behavior.”
411 – Lit Map of Frisco « Strange Maps
[This is good.]
This is the DORKIEST TUMBLE EVER, but most of you are science types and SHOULD appreciate this. This is the IPCC’s statement of the physical science basis for anthropogenic global warming, and boy does it go into the dirty little details of climate science. Start with the FAQ and then pick up the Technical Summary. You have a duty to know about this.
Also: Good news! The Gulf Stream isn’t actually going to shut down anytime this century. And if it did, there’d be so much carbon in the air that Europe would be fine without it anyway. :X
I had Mechanical Turk OCR a big stack of handwritten forms for me. The Turkers made some mistakes in the transcription that I would never have made, because I knew what the writer meant to write. I wonder if the writers let their handwriting grow sloppier because they expected the forms to be read by someone with enough context to be able to correct any misreadings.
“His career is proof that a lifetime of privilege and its attendant advantages need not make one callous to the suffering of the less fortunate who are so often denied those advantages.”
A really cute visualization of recent big bankruptcies, via twitter:@subikonos, who heard me complaining a little too loudly about a really BAD infographic about something else completely. Refreshing!
“The scene shifted once more. My whiskey camera began to pan back and widen out, further and further, taking it all in, the entire pseudo-city, the whole of that fine, gleaming wasteland.”
Excuse me, sir, I’m lost. I’m looking for a place where I can get lost…
“To summarize my main points: A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has. Men go to extremes more than women, and this fits in well with culture using them to try out lots of different things, rewarding the winners and crushing the losers.”
“This amendment is as clear as day. It explicitly bars using the funds in this bill to ‘transfer, release or incarcerate’ any of the Guantanamo detainees in the United States. When the Administration closes Guantanamo, we will ensure it does so the right way.”
Think Progress » Reid: Guantanamo Detainees Should Not Be Held In U.S. Prisons
Oh, I’m so angry about this.
“Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement,” he continues. “It’s an indisputable receipt for your existence. And if you allow that to be squandered by other people who are as bored as you are, it’s gonna say a lot about who you are as a person.”
“Tried to edit my Google Apps start page using Google Chrome - got message that “this browser isn’t supported. ” Firing up Firefox.”
“New video evidence has surfaced showing that U.S. military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population. Soldiers also have imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, the two dominant languages of Afghanistan.”
“The result is a character who exterminates an entire race and yet remains fundamentally innocent. The purpose of this paper is to examine the methods Card uses to construct this story of a guiltless genocide, to point out some contradictions inherent in this scenario, and to raise questions about the intention-based morality advocated by Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.”
“LIFE IS STRONGER THAN DEATH”
A church sign in Newton.
I feel like there are plentiful counterexamples.
Turning Government Data into Usable Information. API’s for “civic coders” inclined towards transparency through data visualization. God this is sexy.
Art for a Dollar [via twitter:@kimsigold]
“It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.”
“On Christmas 2006, tens of thousands of people found Linksys routers under their Christmas trees. Thousands called Linksys. Normally, this wouldn’t have caused a problem. But an earthquake had struck in Asia the night before, severing the phone lines that connect 80 percent of Linksys’ support representatives in places like the Philippines to people in North America.
Linksys dodged a bullet that day. Its on-hold system automatically reminds people to check the support forum. Christmas day saw registration, search, and posts in the support site all surging. People got the answers they needed. And amazingly, customer complaints didn’t spike. For Linksys, the groundswell saved Christmas.
”
Groundswell (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff)
(I lol’d.)
Telekinesis - Imaginary Friend (from Telekinesis!).
Somewhere between Tegan & Sara, the New Pornographers, and Death Cab for Cutie (cheating: Chris Walla produced the album). I really like this guy!
“For Farina, the notable thing about virtual communities is not that they replace traditional communities, but rather that our desire for them to do so speaks of another kind of alienation that runs rampant in the culture.”
“Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office wasn’t so sure. Although the mayor supports medical marijuana, Newsom has said he does not favor efforts to legalize pot, and his office was noncommittal about the proposal for the city to sell it. “The mayor will have to hash this out with public health officials,” press secretary Nathan Ballard said. “It’s the mayor’s job to weed out bad legislation. And to be blunt, this sounds pretty bad.”
Mirkarimi proposal: Let S.F. sell medical pot
At least they have a sense of humor about it.
“I pulled Keyes aside before his speech and asked him what he would do if he were Obama. “If I were in Obama’s position, first thing I’d do is show us his birth certificate. That’s what I’d do. I’d put to rest the shadow of illegitimacy that hangs over his presidency in the minds of people all over this country.”
You can’t really make this stuff up.
“A few days ago I wrote about the Twitter revolution in Moldova. Today we are beginning to see Twitter used politically in a slightly different way, to trigger an anti-corporate Twitter riot against Amazon. Looking forward to see how events unfold - and might soon post a more detailed analysis of the situation.”
#Amazonfail and the politics of anti-corporate cyberactivism | Net Effect
This is a pretty good post otherwise… but I feel like this paragraph is symptomatic. Why can nobody write a post about Twitter and anything without concluding that Twitter and consumers or students or activists or whatever will clearly take over the world tomorrow full stop the end? People just get SO EXCITED
“if Twitter *isn’t* a strategy, what would you propose? http://is.gd/s2YL #p2 #nptech @rootwork @epolitics @drdigipol @alapoet @adamsargant”
Any other questions about the disadvantages of in-stream metadata?
Every activist email must have a plausible “theory of change.” People should see some concrete theory about why taking action could lead to a desired result. But some people choose to inflame people’s passions just to get their email addresses (and, more likely than not, to fundraise from them — as opposed to later engaging them in quality activism). This sullys the online activism process for the rest of us. That’s why getting emails like this one from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee recently was both insulting and maddening…
