Eclecticism

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."