May 2009
105 posts
Calling Spades - Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Byron York:
On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular...
April 2009
124 posts
!= » FIRE, Detroit, GOP, Microsoft →
Microsoft is the Detroit of software. It makes big, ugly, dangerous, resource-hogging crap, and its “success” is based on…its “success.” Vast sectors of our economy, from enormous enterprises to mom-and-pop shops, desperately depend on its continued dominance; and when it collapses, they—and we—will be screwed.
That seems like a good analogy. Of course, Detroit lasted for a long, long time...
“Let’s be brutally honest: the manga model for robot-assisted aged care is...”
– Néojaponisme - On the simulation of amae (Amae is the Japanese word for spoiling little kids)
Reform the University as We Know It
Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a...
How text selection should work
Recently, Pierre Igot kicked off a thing by linking to an old article by John Gruber about how text selection works in OS X in his own article, Shrinking and expanding selections in Mac OS X, about how this is still handled fairly inconsistently. Sample quote:
Sadly, three years later, things are still a total mess in Mac OS X, even when one keeps the focus exclusively on Apple’s own software...
“In the early 1990s I had negotiated a transaction with a fabulously wealthy Hong...”
– Jim Manzi - Hong Kong: Prepare to Be Assimilated
Tone Matrix →
A crazy sound makeamajig.
“The fight playing out between the left and the right now isn’t “Did...”
– Dahlia Lithwick - Will anything about the U.S. torture scandal ever scandalize us again?
Suggestion for a new CAPTCHA system →
Slate.com, “It’s time to move beyond those squiggly letter tests”:
Any solution that could replace CAPTCHAs en masse would have to be free, work across a wide variety of platforms, and be easy for the average blogger or Web admin to install. One of the reasons that CAPTCHAs have spread like kudzu, I suspect, is that they’re so easy to implement—in some cases, as simple...
William Pfaff - American Fascism →
Pfaff goes balls out, as usual:
President Obama’s unwillingness to see his first term dominated by the crimes of the Bush administration is comprehensible.
Yet there is a limit. The latest case of the human moral vacuum created and encouraged during the Bush years is so outrageous, perverse, sadistic and nihilistic that it demands attention, for all that it tells us about the rest that...
Transparency is Bunk (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) →
The way a typical US transparency project works is pretty simple. You find a government database, work hard to get or parse a copy, and then put it online with some nice visualizations.
The problem is that reality doesn’t live in the databases. Instead, the databases that are made available, even if grudgingly, form a kind of official cover story, a veil of lies over the real workings of...
The Onion - Seymour Hersh Uncovers New Thing Too... →
This story is quite accurate.
Why Guido Doesn't Like Tail Recursion Elimination →
Proposal for web font embedding… →
WatchSquaremin: A Theremin-Style Instrument via Flip
True theremins are kind of a pain (but also really awesome), because the shape of your hand affects the sound. Pamelia Kurstin has said in interviews that it takes a lot of self-control, which means she can’t drink or even get too excited before a show.
Sometimes I wonder what would it be like if there were a new Ghostbusters movie but Soul Finger by the Bar-Kays replaced the old theme song…
“夏永き
古人は何を
する人ぞ
Endless summer:
the ancients, I wonder,
how did they live?”
– Apologies to Bashō
