Links

Sometime between July 22nd and July 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Why Intelligent People Fail: "1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance." And nineteen more all-too-familiar reasons.
• The Web’s Five Most Endangered Words: "The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: Let me think about that. [..] When confronted with the realtime web's constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update. […] Other news and information doesn't necessarily fit into the new instant-response model. But as everything merges into a single stream, it's getting more difficult to turn off the reflex and the sense of urgency long enough to identify the data that requires a little more consideration."
• The 9 Greatest Dystopian Music Videos: "Musicians love to buck conformity. And what better metaphor for fighting social pressure than a good dystopian music video? Here are 9 of our favorites." Best part about this post: Rick Springfield's "Bop 'Till You Drop". Not for the song — ugh, that's the kind of '80s pop I don't need to remember — but I've had that video in my head for years now, and have never been able to remember what song it was for. I could clearly remember the look, the slaves, the alien overlord, and the singer swinging ahead of the laser blasts until the alien is killed, and really wanted to find the video again, but was never able to…until io9 put this post up. Awesome. The video's still fun to watch…I just wish it went with a better song.
• SLEDGEHAMMER and WHORE: "WOMAN: 'Well…I met someone claiming to be you on the internet and he paid me to come to your office and have sex with him. Only he didn't pay me. He left. And now I've wasted my whole fucking night.' At which point I write the word 'hooker' on the bottom of the envelope I'm using to take notes and hold it up for the wife. Now, it is perhaps a testimony or a condemnation to the way that I've lived my life that at no point during my conversation with this hooker calling me from my office and asking for payment does my wife for EVEN AN INSTANT think that perhaps, yes, she should be concerned that a hooker is calling her husband at home asking for payment. Now I don't know about the rest of you, but this is a first for me, and my mind is racing. What to do? What information do I need? How do I go about getting it? I'm proud of myself for writing 'hooker' on the envelope but I know I've got to do better than that. What pops into my head is: WHAT WOULD THE MENTALIST DO?"
• BP Cleanup Workers Gone Wild: "'We'll be here as long as oil keeps washing up,' the contractor says. 'So…' I laugh sort of helplessly. 'A year?' 'Three years…' he says. 'Five years…' 'Hopefully forever,' the guy next to him says. 'I need this job if I can't work offshore anymore.' Last week, the emcee that accompanies the oil wrestlers yelled into the microphone, 'Let that oil gush! Let that money flow!' The workers–part of the new Grand Isle scenery of helicopters, Hummers, and National Guardsmen, serious people in uniforms and coveralls and work boots–the workers around the wrestling ring, drunk and blowing cash from jobs that might kill them, cheered."

Sometime between July 19th and July 22nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• BP Cleanup Workers Gone Wild: "'We'll be here as long as oil keeps washing up,' the contractor says. 'So…' I laugh sort of helplessly. 'A year?' 'Three years…' he says. 'Five years…' 'Hopefully forever,' the guy next to him says. 'I need this job if I can't work offshore anymore.' Last week, the emcee that accompanies the oil wrestlers yelled into the microphone, 'Let that oil gush! Let that money flow!' The workers–part of the new Grand Isle scenery of helicopters, Hummers, and National Guardsmen, serious people in uniforms and coveralls and work boots–the workers around the wrestling ring, drunk and blowing cash from jobs that might kill them, cheered."
• Photos and Public Security: "Legally, it's pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you're not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, 'The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you're entitled to photograph it.' What's more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that 'the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act.' But this doesn't stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don't seem much like national-security zones. "
• Geek Culture’S 26 Most Awesome Female Ass-Kickers: "A minority presence in sci-fi and action realms even in 2010, women warriors remain the exception to the guy-centric rule in film, TV, videogames and comic books. But that's changing, according to Action Flick Chick blogger Katrina Hill, who moderates the 'Where Are the Action Chicks?' panel Friday at San Diego's Comic-Con International. 'Compare the original Predator to this summer's Predators,' she said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. 'The original film was a complete boy's club, with the only woman in the movie being a hostage. Today, Predators has a kick-ass chick mixed in as an equal amongst these other badass men. So there are steps being taken in the right direction. It just takes time.' Here's a look at 26 sexy-fierce female ass-kickers who've relied on biceps and brains to periodically kick-start geek culture."
• How Angelina Jolie Fought to Keep Salt From Becoming "Pretty": "Angelina Jolie's spy-fi movie, Salt, was originally supposed to star a man. But after she came aboard, Jolie fought to keep her character from turning into a stereotypical femme fatale. We talked to her about busting heads, MacGyvering and more. During the roundtables for the spy film Salt, we sat down with Angelina Jolie, Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and Director Phillip Noyce."
• Angelina Jolie Jolts a Man’s World: Action Films: "'It's definitely unusual that a female has become an action star,' 'Salt' producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura says. 'But it's a funny thing. She's not a female action star; she's an action star. She's really the first female to transcend gender. I don't think it's occurred before.'"

Sometime between July 14th and July 15th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons: "A new colon is on the march. For now let's call it the 'jumper colon'. For grammarians, it's a dependent clause + colon + just about anything, incorporating any and all elements of the other four colons, yet differing crucially in that its pre-colon segment is always a dependent clause. For everyone else: its usefulness lies in that it lifts you up and into a sentence you never thought you'd be reading by giving you a compact little nugget of information prior to the colon and leaving you on the hook for whatever comes thereafter, often rambling on until the reader has exhausted his/her theoretical lung capacity and can continue to read no longer."
• How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made: "A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that's just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now. Here's how it's going down."
• What, if Anything, Is Big Bird?: "Zoologist Mike Dickison talks about the PhD research he's been doing on a flightless bird."
• “Fleeting Expletive” Ban Lifted: "Reacting to a Supreme Court order to take a new look at 'indecency' on radio and TV, the Second Circuit Court suggested on Tuesday that constitutional law on free speech may need to be updated for the Digital Age, especially now that 'new offensive and indecent words are invented every day.' Even so, applying First Amendment doctrine as it now exists, the three-judge panel struck down the Federal Communications Commission's ban on the day and evening broadcast of even single 'fleeting expletives.' If the Obama Administration plans to continue defending the ban, the case could be on its way back to the Supreme Court."

Sometime between July 13th and July 14th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• “Fleeting Expletive” Ban Lifted: "Reacting to a Supreme Court order to take a new look at 'indecency' on radio and TV, the Second Circuit Court suggested on Tuesday that constitutional law on free speech may need to be updated for the Digital Age, especially now that 'new offensive and indecent words are invented every day.' Even so, applying First Amendment doctrine as it now exists, the three-judge panel struck down the Federal Communications Commission's ban on the day and evening broadcast of even single 'fleeting expletives.' If the Obama Administration plans to continue defending the ban, the case could be on its way back to the Supreme Court."
• Mayor McGinn Proposes Letting Bars Stay Open Later, or All Night: "Letting bars serve liquor later or even all night is one controversial option Mayor Mike McGinn is considering as part of a new initiative to curb nightclub noise and violence. McGinn presented his proposal — which also includes required bar security-officer training, tighter noise restrictions and more late-night bus service — at a rock-concert-themed news conference Tuesday night on Capitol Hill. McGinn said his proposal is 'a new approach to an age-old issue.'"
• Reviewing the History Channel’s World War II shows as if they were genre fiction TV:: "Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons."
• Soccer fans shun hookers for art’s sake: "The influx of thousands of soccer fans would increase demand on South African sex workers; at least that was the belief of a leading expert prior to the start of the 2010 World Cup. But it seems fans of the beautiful game that traveled to the Rainbow Nation have created a flop in sex-worker business — leaving prostitutes out-of-pocket and out of work — in favor of more high-brow pursuits."
• Embattled Marysville School Board member resigns: "Kundu's decision came after the NAACP, the Tulalip Tribes, the Hispanic Commission and four board members asked him to resign in the weeks following a June 3 e-mail in which Kundu suggested that different races have different brain sizes and intellectual capacities. Those racial differences, he implied, help explain the school district's achievement gap."

Sometime between July 4th and July 12th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere: "Phil Schiller, Apple's longtime head of marketing, put [Mike] Evangelist on a team charged with coming up with ideas for a DVD-burning program that…would later become iDVD. 'We had about three weeks to prepare,' Evangelist says. He and another employee went to work creating beautiful mock-ups depicting the perfect interface for the new program. On the appointed day, Evangelist and the rest of the team gathered in the boardroom. They'd brought page after page of prototype screen shots showing the new program's various windows and menu options, along with paragraphs of documentation describing how the app would work. 'Then Steve comes in,' Evangelist recalls. 'He doesn't look at any of our work. He picks up a marker and goes over to the whiteboard. He draws a rectangle. 'Here's the new application,' he says. 'It's got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says burn. That's it. That's what we're going to make.' '"
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong: "The Seattle City Council is about to give the state permission to dig the world's largest deep-bore tunnel under downtown Seattle. Here's what the city council doesn't want you to know before they vote." I've thought the deep-bore tunnel was a disastrous idea from the get go, and this article just hammers home how right I was. Scary how committed some people are to pushing this through, no matter what.
• The Name of the Game: "'Soccer,' by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby's nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers–a bit of upper-class twittery, as in 'champers,' for champagne, or 'preggers,' for enceinte. 'Soccer' is rugger's equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The 'soc' part is short for 'assoc,' which is short for 'association,' as in 'association football,' the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA–the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S."
• Bookstore Embraces, Bucks Web: "On Monday, Once Sold Tales opened an old-fashioned walk-in bookstore, in the front of the company's main warehouse (the website business remains.) It's stocked with their orphaned books, the ones destined for the pulp factory. The price, for all books, is $1 a pound. No shipping costs, but you gotta get there in person. And by 'there,' I mean in the middle of warehouse nowhere — 22442 72nd Ave. S. in Kent."
• Mac SSD performance and TRIM in OSX: "As we've seen from previous coverage, TRIM support is vital to help SSDs maintain performance over extended periods of time — while Microsoft and the SSD manufacturers have publicized its inclusion in Windows 7, Apple has been silent on whether OS X will support it. bit-tech decided to see how SSD performance in OS X is affected by extended use — and the results, at least with the Macbook Air, are startling. The drive doesn't seem to suffer very much at all, even after huge amounts of data have been written to it."

Sometime between June 28th and July 4th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Troopers issue nearly 700 citations for using cell, texting while driving: "State troopers have issued nearly 670 citations for cell phone or texting violations since June 10, when holding a cell phone became a primary traffic offense. At $124 a violation, that's about $83,000 in fines. The count runs through Thursday, July 1. The State Patrol district that includes King County leads with the biggest number of stops, 235, and the biggest number of citations, 142."
• Architecture’s Modern Marvels: "When V.F. asked 52 experts to choose the five most important works of architecture created since 1980, they named a staggering 132 different structures. Here are the top 21, in order of popularity." (Seattle's Central Library places fifth!)
• Why Some Countries Drive on the Right and Some Countries Drive on the Left: "Today I found out why some countries drive on the right and some countries drive on the left. The origin of this varies based on the time period and country, but primarily throughout history people used the 'keep-left' rule. It has only been very recently that the world has predominately switched to the 'keep-right' rule."
• Scientists Invent First Male Contraceptive Pill: "The scientist behind the male pill discovery has developed a tablet that removes a vital protein in sperm that is required for a woman to conceive. So while sperm still get through to the uterus they are unable to fertilise an egg. Using this approach, researchers believe they have a pill that is 100 pc effective at stopping pregnancy. Not only is it long lasting but it also has other pluses. There are no side effects as suffered by women who take the contraceptive pill."
• Surely It’s 30 (Don’t Call Me Shirley!): "'A lot of comedies in the last 30 years have wanted to be 'Airplane!,' ' said Patton Oswalt, a comedian and actor and the voice of the hero in 'Ratatouille.' 'But most of those movies took the wrong message from 'Airplane!' They were gag, gag, gag, gag, where 'Airplane!' is really structured, driving the story along all the time. In a weird way it's like a Beatles movie. It looks like the easiest thing in the world, but there's a lot of sweat and blood that went into it.'"

Sometime between June 24th and June 25th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Female Characters in Toy Story Don’t Get Much Play: "Toy Story 3 opens on a woman-empowerment high, with Mrs. Potato-Head displaying mad train-robbing skills and cowgirl Jessie skillfully steering her faithful horse Bullseye in the ensuing chase. And that's the end of that. From there on, the film displays the same careless sexism as its predecessors. (Note: some spoilers ahead.)"
• Not Safe for Work: "Moral arguments aside, the most common argument for the prohibition of sex work is that such work is a danger to the individuals involved, but research on sex work confirms what anecdotal evidence has long-time suggested, that neither traffickers nor pimps nor drugs nor disease but the stigmatized and criminalized nature of sex work is the greatest contributing factor making the industry dangerous."
• Doom, Duke3D and More: A Guide to Some Early FPS and Source Ports: "Are you an aging gamer, like me, and do you find yourself pining for the days of gaming yore occasionally, when the sound and fury of the latest warporn deathsim Medal of Duty and Honour: America's Bullet Pride game, fun as it might be, has left your head ringing? Yearn for some simple sprites and some chiptuney soundtracks? Is your computer a bit crap and does 11,000 frames per second† sound like something you might enjoy?<br />
  <br />
  Well, read on, friends."
• About 100 Words: "THE IDEA IS SIMPLE: WRITE 100 WORDS A DAY, EVERY DAY, FOR ONE MONTH You can write about anything you want. Anything. Some people open tiny windows into their lives; others write surrealist poetry. Some writers post finely tuned, perfectly crafted vignettes; others show up at the end of the night and spew drunken nonsense onto the screen. You bring the content. We set the format. This is an exercise in disciplined creativity. Writing exactly 100 words at a time — not a single word more, not a single word less — isn't as easy as it sounds. The word count may be arbitrary, but the motive is not. To borrow from Proust, the tyranny of rhyme often brings out the poet's best work."
• "To the Straight Guy at the Party Last Night": "A mutual friend of ours threw a big party for her 30th birthday, tons of people were there and it was a lot of fun. Somewhere along the line you and I ended up on the balcony for some fresh air at the same time. We started chatting…. We talked about hanging out sometime, and you wanted to meet my girlfriend. I understand how upsetting it was for you when I blinked mildly in surprise and said I was here with my husband. I know it was a shock to your system, if your face had turned any paler I might have called 911. […] I can't blame you — I forgot how delicate you straight boys are. So I wanted to give you a few helpful hints about where you went wrong last night."

Sometime between June 18th and June 24th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• SCOTUSblog » Today’s Decision in Doe v. Reed: "By a broad eight-to-one majority in an opinion by the Chief Justice, the Supreme Court today held in Doe v. Reed that signatories of referendum petitions generally do not have a constitutional right — i.e., a right that would trump state open government laws — to keep their identities private. But the Court held — again, by the same broad majority — that courts should consider in any given case whether a particular referendum presents sufficiently unique circumstances that anonymity is required. It therefore permitted the claim to anonymity in this case, which involves a referendum on gay rights, to proceed in the lower courts. But their chances of prevailing appear very slim, as five members of the Court either expressed significant doubts about their claim or expressly rejected it."
• Supreme Court on R-71: Names on Anti-Gay Rights Petition Public: "The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the names of people who signed petitions in an attempt to overturn a new gay rights law in Washington must be made public, a victory for state officials who said the case was a test of open government laws."
• My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft Auto: "At this point my son was familiar with the game's mechanics and hopped into the ambulance. As he put the crime fighting behind him, he wondered aloud if it was possible to take people to the hospital. I instruct him to press R3, and then he was off to save a few lives. He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn't want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck."
• "Login" Is Not a Verb: "Despite what many people –mostly in the computer field– think, 'login' is not a verb. It's simply not. Whether or not 'login' is a word at all may spark a debate in some circles, but assuming it is then it may act as many parts of speech, but not as a verb. I will repeat the important part for clarity: 'login' is not a verb. It's simply not."
• The iPad: A Near-Miracle for My Son With Autism: "My son Leo's life was transformed when a five-dollar raffle ticket turned into a brand-new iPad. I'm not exaggerating. Before the iPad, Leo's autism made him dependent on others for entertainment, play, learning, and communication. With the iPad, Leo electrifies the air around him with independence and daily new skills. People who know Leo are amazed when they see this new boy rocking that iPad. I'm impressed, too, especially when our aggressively food-obsessed boy chooses to play with his iPad rather than eat. I don't usually dabble in miracle-speak, but I may erect a tiny altar to Steve Jobs in the corner of our living room."

Sometime between June 9th and June 18th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Lunch Shop for Ironworkers Rises With Skyscraper: "The restaurant, a Subway franchise, opened its door on Wednesday at the top of the steel honeycomb that forms 1 World Trade Center, the skyscraper rising at ground zero. The building will be the city's tallest when finished in 2013, and the sandwich shop, currently sitting on the 27th floor, will rise along with it."
• Who Is the Best Soccer Player at the World Cup? Science Has the Answer.: "The key was identifying the real objective in a soccer game isn't so much scoring goals as it is moving the ball away from your own goal and towards the opposing team's, thereby maximizing your team's scoring opportunities. As such, players that are successful in maintaining possession of the ball for their team maximize their team's chances of success."
• Modify the Look of the Safari 5 Reader Function: "Safari 5 introduces the Safari Reader feature, for selecting article bodies to make reading and printing easier. I started looking around for where this new Reader functionality lives to see if it was customizable and I found that it is."
• Leviticans: "I would like to make the suggestion that there is an entire class of self-identified 'Christians' who are not Christian at all, in the sense that they don't follow the actual teachings of Christ in any meaningful way. Rather these people nod toward Christ in a cursory fashion on their way to spend time in the bloodier books of the Bible (which tend to be found in the Old Testament), using the text selectively as a support for their own hates and prejudices, using the Bible as a cudgel rather than a door. That being the case, I suggest we stop calling these people Christians and start calling them something that befits their faith, inclinations and enthusiasms. I say we call them Leviticans, after Leviticus, the third book of the Old Testament, famous for its rules, and also the home of the passages most likely to be thrown out by Leviticans to justify their intolerance."
• Gallery: Digitizing the Past and Present at the Library of Congress: "The Library of Congress has nearly 150 million items in its collection, including at least 21 million books, 5 million maps, 12.5 million photos and 100,000 posters. The largest library in the world, it pioneers both preservation of the oldest artifacts and digitization of the most recent–so that all of it remains available to future generations. I recently took a tour of two LoC departments that exemplify this mission: the Preservation Research and Testing Division in Washington, D.C., and the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va. The library's preservation specialists use the latest technology to study and scan ancient books, maps and other historical artifacts."

Sometime between June 7th and June 9th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The Story Behind the Recycled Newspaper Prop: "Brow Beat has learned that the prop comes from a small newspaper prop company called the Earl Hays Press in Sun Valley, Calif. Started in 1915, Earl Hays is one of the oldest newspaper prop companies, and the paper in question was first printed in the 1960s (note the top-hat ad on the lower left), then offered as a 'period paper,' better suited for Mad Men (where it has not appeared) than Scrubs (where it has)."
• Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club: "The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox's Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it's surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines."
• Study: Secondhand Smoke May Affect Mental Health: "researchers at University College of London have quantified another health risk for those exposed to secondhand smoke: mental-health ills. In a study of 8,155 men and women in the Scottish Health survey, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers led by Mark Hamer at University College of London documented a 50% greater risk of psychological distress in nonsmokers with the highest levels of nicotine residue in their blood, compared with those with the lowest levels."
• How to Send Your Face to Space: "NASA wants to put your face in space. No, really: Just in time for the last two space shuttle flights, NASA is offering to fly pictures of anyone who uploads a head shot on their Face in Space website to the International Space Station."
• Kids of Lesbians Have Fewer Behavioral Problems, Study Suggests: "A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers. The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children's well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews. Children from lesbian families rated higher in social, academic and total competence. They also showed lower rates in social, rule-breaking, aggressive problem behavior."