Links

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."

Sometime between May 29th and June 6th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• After 10 Years, Experience Music Project Is Still Perplexing: "After 10 years on the Seattle cityscape, billionaire Paul Allen's Experience Music Project still generates controversy. Everyone agrees that the rock museum's design is unique and its construction was a technical marvel, but there's little agreement about whether it's beautiful or ugly. World-famous architect Frank Gehry said the building was meant to celebrate the sometimes chaotic process of creating the kind of music it's devoted to, but critics still say it's just too odd."
• How You Can Live Like a Vulcan Without Bleeding Green: "…let's face it – Vulcans are way cooler than Jedi or Na'vi anyway. (At least if you ignore Star Trek: Enterprise, which you really, really should.) Vulcans are quite possibly the most fully realized alien race television or movies have ever created, and not just because they have a complex culture and history. Vulcans have something most made-up races can only dream of: a central contradiction that's ultra-compelling. They're overflowing cauldrons of passion, who have mastered their emotions to such a high degree they appear almost robotic. No matter how pissed off or freaked out you might ever get, you can't be as hot-blooded as a Vulcan. And you'll have to work pretty hard to be half as cool."
• Google Ditches Windows on Security Concerns: "'We're not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,' said one Google employee. 'Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks,' said another. New hires are now given the option of using Apple's Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system."
• Facebook: Privacy Problems and PR Nightmare: "One gets the impression that Facebook doesn't take any of this stuff very seriously. It just views the complaints as little fires that need to be put out. The statements Facebook issues aren't meant to convey any real information – they're just blasts from a verbal fire extinguisher, a cloud of words intended not to inform, but to smother. Just keep talking, the idea seems to be, and it doesn't matter what you say. In fact the more vapid and insincere you can be, the better. Eventually the world will get sick of the sound of your voice, and the whiners will give up and go away."
• Presidential Proclamation–Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month: "NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2010 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon all Americans to observe this month by fighting prejudice and discrimination in their own lives and everywhere it exists."

Sometime between May 25th and May 28th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Today’s College Students Lack Empathy: "College students today are less likely to 'get' the emotions of others than their counterparts 20 and 30 years ago, a new review study suggests. Specifically, today's students scored 40 percent lower on a measure of empathy than their elders did. The findings are based on a review of 72 studies of 14,000 American college students overall conducted between 1979 and 2009. 'We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,' said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research."
• Is Queen’s "Invisible Man" the Best Scifi Music Video of All Time? Yes.: "How awesome is the music video for 'The Invisible Man'? Let's just say that if there was a machine that could quantify awesomeness, this machine would be built of dinosaur bones and powered by the inchoate yalps of happy babies. Here's the music video – we'll dissect its scenes and themes below."
• Republicans’ New Web Site Not Exactly What They Hoped It Would Be: "The Web site filters out obscenity and the like, but it hasn't kept out hundreds of ideas: some serious, some offensive and some so wacky they surely must be Democratic sabotage. 'Let kids vote!' recommended one. 'Let's make a 'Social Security Lotto,' ' proposed another. 'What dope came up with the idea of criminalizing a parent's right to administer corporal punishment?' a third demanded. Some contributors demanded action to uncover conspiracies involving the 9/11 attacks and the 'NEW WORLD ORDER.' One forward thinker recommended that we 'build the city of the future somewhere in a non-inhabit part of the United States, preferably the desert.'"
• Ten of the Greatest Maps That Changed the World: "From the USSR's Be On Guard! map in 1921 to Google Earth, a new exhibition at the British Library charts the extraordinary documents that transformed the way we view the globe forever"
• Is Texting [or using a cellphone] Legal if I’m at a Stoplight?: No, and after June 10th, you can get cited: "'Even though you are stopped, you're still in physical control of the automobile, which would require you at a moment's notice to take off,' State Patrol Sgt. Freddy Williams said. 'Are you going to stop texting immediately when the light turns green?'"

Sometime between May 21st and May 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• After Keeping Us Waiting for a Century, Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All: "The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century. That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist."
• Cripple Crab Crutch: "A two-disc album of spoken word mash-ups. Source materials ranging from the paranormal, the historical, the literary, the scholarly, the philosophical and religious, film excerpts, strange old recordings, radio shows, comedy, and an old Disneyland attraction."
• The Swinger: "The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect."
• 10 Days in a Carry-on: "Heather Poole, a flight attendant from Los Angeles, demonstrated how to pack enough for a 10-day trip into a single standard carry-on."
• The Pirate Bay | Cracked.com: "The Pirate Bay is the largest torrent website in the world. According to the RIAA, it rates somewhere between Nazi Dinosaurs and The League of Extraordinary Evil on the Global Threat Scale." I'm not a huge fan of Cracked — their humor tends to rely a bit much on foul language for my tastes — but this infographic is great.