Big Contrarian is a weblog by Jack Shedd, a designer and a developer
in the process of moving to Chicago, IL.

30 satellite images that look more like abstract art:

The images you see below were taken at the turn of the Millennium, when NASA’s scientists had a brilliant idea: to scan through 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite and display only the most the most beautiful. A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.

My favorite was easily this image of Richat Structure in Mauritiana:

Deep rings in the ground near the Saharan town of Oudane mark a geological formation that resembles a bull’s eye or whirlpool. Its dramatic grooves are only entirely visible from a great altitude and although appearing to be the result of an impact crater, were formed when a volcanic dome hardened, gradually eroding to expose beautiful onion-like layers of rock.

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With the inclusion of Back to Mac in Leopard, I often find myself logging into my home machine from work, and vice-versa. Today, I forgot to quit the Screen Sharing application before I left home. Trying to log into the home machine from my work machine produced interesting results.

I swear Remote Desktop used to prevent you from doing precisely this.

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How to make a hamburger that resembles the 1UP mushroom from Super Mario Bros.

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37signals is dropping support for IE6:

The Internet Explorer 6 browser was released back in 2001, and Internet Explorer 7, the replacement, was released nearly two years ago in 2006. Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences. Since IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our customers, it’s time to finally move beyond IE 6.

May this be the first in a long-line of similar announcements.

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Christopher Hitchens accepted an invitation to subject himself to the water boarding torture technique and lasted about 15 seconds.

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The cover designs for Penguin’s third installment of their Great Ideas series.

Buy the first installment and the second one if happen to have an extra 500 bucks burning a whole in your pocket.

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An authoritative and fascinating look at the history of the C programming language by its inventor, Dennis Ritchie:

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

A bit dry, but worth the time. C is the invisible fundamental of technology, and knowing as much as you can about it can’t hurt.

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The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design.

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Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist, is pouring his own millions into science experiments to counter global warming:

(A)fter a discussion that lasted only an hour, he told the scientist, “I don’t care about the rest of the business plan. You don’t need to estimate costs. You don’t need to do a cash flow. You don’t need to do a presentation. Just hire five people, set up a lab, and go.”

Those damn capitalists. So intent on exploiting everyone.

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A rather scathing review of the latest men’s collections shown in Paris this week:

They aren’t so much about real dreams and opinions as random thoughts […] (T)here is a meaninglessness about the collections, which ended on Sunday, and more than the usual serving. It’s odd to look at all the femmy touches — the puffed-sleeve blouses (can we use that word?) at Lanvin, the soft cowl-neck sweaters at Louis Vuitton, the ruffles at Comme des Garçons and Number (N)ine — and actually think that fashion is having this discussion. Now. Haven’t we had it before?

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Stop complaining about gentrification:

(A) new study suggests the popular notion of the yuppie invasion is exaggerated. “We’re not saying there aren’t communities where displacement isn’t happening,” says Randall Walsh, an associate professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the study’s authors. “But in general, across all neighborhoods in the urbanized parts of the U.S., it looks like gentrification is a pretty good thing.”

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If you ever need proof designers take themselves far too seriously, look no further than this rant from Carole Guevin:

Consumerism is pursuing the potentiality of an endless dream stream of profits for a few and, exploitation of the most. There is a lot of brainware involved in figuring out the best way to construct cheap and sell a lot. Problem ‘solving’ is mostly attached to return on investment (ROI). As the downfall of the industrious rip of earth resources is surfacing, we are now facing a whole new ball game where a paradigm shift is required, shoving once again creativity to the forefront.

As best can be understood, Guevin’s point seems to be that ideas are taking the place of the physical, making “creatives” the primary agents of solution and change. There’s some bits about the horrors of capitalism, and the interconnectedness of the world, but by and large this is a piece dedicated to the idea that creatives are generally awesome and the best, last hope for this oh-so-terrible world of ours.

The premise is nothing new. The Knowledge Economy has been a redundant theme in business journalism for the last decade. But we should be clear. The world is still largely focused, and will continue to be focused on physical goods. It’s just our economy that is shifting to knowledge, as our labor force has been augmented by cheaper labor in developing nations. Run a survey of the jobs of most individuals in the world and you’ll find that the vast majority are still in positions of physical output: industrial, farming or otherwise.

The irony of Guevin not recognizing this, given her emphasis on interconnectedness is astonishing.

The top of the food chain, where knowledge workers such as “creatives” sit, is growing. Advances in technology and methodology have created increases in productivity which mean fewer people are required in the production of goods. The burgeoning middle-class has increased the demand for goods though, so the virtuous cycle ensures there will always be industry. Always a need for an every increasing number of goods. This gains have created many idle hands, which are being routed more and more into the fields of communication and idea generation.

But “ideas” and “solutions” have always been highly valued. The only change is perhaps that you have more people turning out ideas, though the signal to noise ratio probably remains about the same. And while there are new specific challenges being faced by this generation, every generation has had challenges of their own to overcome; Everything is different, but everything is the same.

Designers are so low on the list of people capable of solving the problems we face that essays like Guevin’s are laughable. I don’t care how clever your layouts are, we, as designers, are incapable of solving global hunger, poverty or warming. We are what we have always been. The messenger, not the message.

Developers on the other hand …

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John Gruber rebuts Joel Splosky on whether a menu item should be disabled when the action is either irrelevant to the context or unable to be completed for some reason:

Spolsky’s suggestion is also predicated on the assumption that the user is stupid. Better is to assume that the user is clever and curious and will be able to figure out for themself why a certain command is currently disabled.

Except even a clever user won’t always be able to suss out just why the menu item is disabled. And if it’s something they assume they should be able to do, even if logically they shouldn’t, it’s just as frustrating. Users don’t always grasp the arcane logic behind the target/action paradigm. Hell, I’m a fairly intelligent guy and sometimes I can’t figure out why a given option is disabled.

Both men are wrong. Both men are right.

John is right that the visual appearance of the menu should reflect the state of the action. Any menu item that is unavailable should be dimmed. This allows an exploring user to quickly scan to see what actions he can take. The menu item should not respond to the mouse over event, and no action should be taken if the user single-clicks on the menu item.

To be a little tautological: if you can’t do something, you shouldn’t be able to do it.

However, Joel is right that there is benefit in explaining to the user just why the menu option was disabled. In many cases it’s something as simple as the current selection being of the wrong data type for the action or there being no selection at all. But in other cases it can be a complex set of criteria which may or may not involved variables the user can’t see and may not know exists. Simply disabling the menu and calling it a day is the lazy way out.

There are other ways to handle that though. In a perfect world, when I hover over a disabled menu item for a few seconds a tooltip could/should appear either telling me why the menu is disabled or pointing me to an explanation elsewhere in the system. On Mac OS X, it might look like this. Copy is shit, but you get the point.

I should also be able to reach this explanation or dialog prompt with a double-click on the disabled menu item.

This is the best of both worlds. What’s disabled is obvious, and why it’s disabled is something the user can easily find out without reading through your help files and user forums.

Update: Lukas Mathis had the same idea, as did Apple’s old Ballon Help.

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A Russian curator, in collaboration with local scientists, has developed a method for dating artwork made after the first nuclear explosion:

According to the inventors, the new patented technology is based on the idea that man-made nuclear explosions in the 1940s and 1950s released isotopes into the environment that do not occur naturally. The tiniest traces of these isotopes, Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, permeated the planet’s soil and plant life, and eventually ended up in all works of art made in the post-war era because natural oils are used as binding agents for paints.

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Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog have come up with a new theory on how the universe began:

(T)hey argued the universe began in just about every way imaginable (and perhaps even some that are not). Out of this profusion of beginnings, like a blend of a God’s eye view of every conceivable kind of creation, the vast majority of the baby universes withered away to leave the mature cosmos that we can see today.

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We have no idea why we laugh or why jokes work:

Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like sex and eating, it is an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same time something that is highly culturally and chronologically specific.

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Joss Whedon apparently got bored during the writer’s strike and called up a bunch of friends. The result was a low-budget film called Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:

I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The film will be broken into three acts, uploaded and streamed for free starting on July 15th and then converting to a paid download on or after July 20th.

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Evan Tan’s brilliant retro-style posters for Wall-E.

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Anita Elberse of the Harvard Business Review looks at the data and concludes Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory to be bullshit:

Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow.

Anderson rebuts:

In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she notes, that “one percent of a million is still 10,000—[…]equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store.”

This is a good moment to remind everyone of the normal definition of “head” and “tail” in entertainment markets such as music. “Head” is the selection available in the largest bricks-and-mortar retailer in the market (that would be Wal-Mart in this case). “Tail” is everything else, most of which is only available online, where there is unlimited shelf space.

The full article is extremely even-handed and research heavy. Worth the read.

I’m calling this one for Elberse.

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A list of super-cool places you should visit, such as the world’s largest public restroom in Chong Qing, China.

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Crafting better CSS font stacks, which has already found it’s way into my style sheet.

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A twitter feed of massively-cheap albums at AmazonMP3. Thanks, John.

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Mandy Brown, of Working Library, on being a critic:

Criticism is the means by which an ideology is promoted and distributed with the aim of making the world a better place. Each critic may have a different idea of what that “better place” may be like (meaning, they may have different, and even conflicting, ideologies), but the methods and nature of their goals are always the same. To judge the critic, then, you must judge her vision of what the world should be.

She’s quickly become one of my favorite reads. Though it often takes me a few minutes to really grok what she’s talking about.

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To hear their founders - and former housemates - tell it, the secret of Whole Foods and The Container Store is a focus on happier employees:

The idea is that happy, empowered employees beget happy customers. Happy suppliers help too. All this stakeholder joy eventually redounds to the benefit of shareholders—but the magic fades if shareholders become the focus.

As a life-long employee of someone else, I agree.

In my industry, web design, I’ve quickly realized that the fastest way to an unhappy client is an unhappy team member. Morale is far more important than most managers I know realize.

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Several noted economists are having a conversation about Bill Gates’ theory of philanthropy:

[The site] is a web experiment designed to produce a book — a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development — to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world’s problems are too big for philanthropy—even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

I’ve only gotten through two of the essays, but this is just a fantastic way to kill a few hours reading.

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Malcolm Gladwell wants to convince us that the way we think about success is completely wrong:

He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

Gladwell always struck me as the guy who had an interesting idea one night while he was stoned, and decided to write a book about it. Both Blink and Tipping Point sound great while you’re reading them, just as many armchair philosophies do, but the more you try to align his hypothesis to his anecdotes and evidence, the more you try to make concrete sense of his ideas, the more holes you find. The world is too complex, and Gladwell often uses too broad a brush.

But the premise of Outliers sounds, again, like a fantastic arm chair philosophy, and I’ll most likely read it like every other middle-class liberal white guy.

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A 52-home community in Canada is heated entirely with solar energy:

Solar heating is a more exciting prospect than solar generation of electricity because heating is a much larger percentage of a home’s total energy use (60% for space heating, 20% for water heating, and 20% for appliances, lights, and other electrical loads).

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Experts are predicting a reduction in the number of domestic flight routes by nearly 10%:

By year’s end, roughly 100 American communities will be left without regular commercial air service, and that number may double next year, according to the Air Transport Association, the industry trade group.

Realizing I may not be the most savvy-business mind to grace this world, how precisely the air industry continues to lose money, year after year, is a mystery to me.

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Chris Riebeschlager is a personal hero of mine:

I remember having this conversation when I was about 14… in 1992. The olden days. $1/gallon gas days.

Boy: “This Telnet chat is cool.”

Me: “Totally.”

Boy: “But what if we had a computer with a really good sound card and a microphone. Then what if we had a really fast internet connection that could handle sending audio. Then you could actually TALK to the person on the other end. They’d just have to have a speaker and a microphone too.”

Me: “So… you’d have a telephone.”

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The economy is facing an energy crisis. Skyrocketing demand and space-rocketing prices may finally make alternative sources economically viable competitors to fossil fuels. Solar energy, the most abundant, is seeing progress every month as new technologies come online that allow for cheaper, more efficient panels.

So what does our forward-thinking and caring government do. Why put a two-year moratorium on building new solar plants of course:

(T)he decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily, reached late last month, has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry, as fledgling solar companies must wait to see if they can realize their hopes of harnessing power from swaths of sun-baked public land, just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating.

In fairness, yes, the environmental impact of these plants should be considered, and studied. And the 130 already submitted applications will be processed, with each project receiving individual attention.

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Bill Gates Last Days, one of maybe 2 actually funny Microsoft-internal videos. How’d I not see this one?

One wonders how much they paid for some of those cameos though. Bono don’t come cheap.

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Enjoy the Silent World of Michael Kenna.

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John Timmer over at Ars Technica takes Wired’s Chris Anderson to task for his Katzian article How The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete:

I can’t possibly imagine how he comes to that conclusion. Correlations are a way of catching a scientist’s attention, but the models and mechanisms that explain them are how we make the predictions that not only advance science, but generate practical applications.

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ICANN voted today to extend the right to third-parties to set up any top-level domain they want, so long as they can afford it.

The new guidelines could lead to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Internet addresses to join “.com,” including “.lat” for Latin America and a Bulgarian address in the Cyrillic script. New names will not start appearing for at least several months, and the Internet agency, called Icann, will not be deciding on specific ones quite yet.

Of course, the existing top-level domains make very little sense. “.com”, “.net” and “.org” are open to registration by just about anyone, and the suffixes no longer mean much. Many country specific top-level domains are also open to just about anyone - including the begging for it .ck. If so many of the existing TLDs hold no real meaning, why bother pretending they do?

But the proposal, as approved, is bullshit. The cost of establishing your own TLD is exorbitant, leaving small-businesses and personal sites left to play in the existing sandbox, or new ones created by entities who may or not be benevolent. Larger companies will of course rush to establish their own TLDs, effectively creating a tiered internet. Custom .name’s for the big boys, regular one’s for everyone else.

Of course, the fact someone can finally get “.xxx” setup and running is great. And yes, the availability of shorter domains will also be a boon to companies struggling with the horseshit that is domain squatters snagging every good domain left. That’s not what worries me.

The internet used to be flat. It was the great equalizer. “www.apple.com” and “www.jackshedd.com” are, for all intents and purposes, equal; Equal until you hit return. With this new proposal, Apple will obviously seek to get “store.apple” running. Because frankly, that’s just a better URL than www.apple.com/store. But little-oh-non-billions having me is gonna be stuck with www.jackshedd.com, and mark my words, the day will come when .com is looked down at just as .ru is now.

“.com? Are those guys legit?”

The barrier to reputation will get higher.

A simple neutrality clause, stating that any newly-minted TLD provider must accept public registrations at a reasonable cost would have made the proposal golden. As it stands, it’s just ICANN begging for money from folks with deep pockets.

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Why the new wiretapping law is a lot worse than you think:

Whatever Hoyer and Pelosi—and even Obama—say, this amounts to a retroactive blessing of the illegal program, and historically it means that the country will probably be deprived of any rigorous assessment of what precisely the administration did between 2001 and 2007.

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Robert Valdemar was bored, and wondered what would happen if he threw random, anonymous, violent love notes online. Some folks assumed it was an alternative-reality game and became dedicated to solving it. Robert played along, and the result was perhaps the greatest Rick Roll yet.

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A school in New Jersey was locked down after a ninja was sighted in nearby woods.

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Mini-Me has a sex tape. I predict slightly lower sales than One Night in Pairs.

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Who doesn’t love afternoon naps? Or morning naps. Or “I’m avoiding work” naps.

Make sure yours are optimal.

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The giant type-nerd in me loves retrospectives like this one on Anivers over at I Love Typography.

Type design is one of those things I wish I was decent at. Sadly the last time I tried, the result ended up looking like someone had subjected Garamond to water-torture. Out of professional dignity, I refuse to show you just what I mean by that.

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The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You, from the folks who brought you the deeply-troubling How to Traumatize Your Children.

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Nicholas Felton and Matt Masons’s collaboration for Penguin Books “Hard Times” is simply gorgeous.

My team recently had to put together a lengthy research document, which meant tons and tons of charts and graphs. Every time the team got stuck, I pulled out Felton’s 2007 Annual Report as a reminder that even relatively boring data can be presented in compelling ways.

Updated: Thanks to Jeremy Ettinghausen for pointing out my Penguin/Pentagram swap.

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Paul Collin asks if modern life has killed the semicolon:

The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that “All [semicolons] do is show that you’ve been to college.”

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William Deresiewicz on the disadvantages of an ivy league education:

Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

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The Cost of War is an illustrative video which helps you visualize just how much we’re spending every day in Iraq.

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Peter Lovenheim decided he wanted to get to know his neighbors and figured the best way to do that was to sleep over at their houses for a night:

Why is it that in an age of cheap long-distance rates, discount airlines and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?

Quick: Name two people living within twenty feet of your home.

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Fifty Designer’s Current Favorite Typefaces, a fantastic little book with proceeds going to UNICEF.

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Steve Albini’s famous missive on The Problem with Music from Maximum Rock n’ Roll in the 90’s:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Sadly, still 100% relevant.

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Allison Radcliffe from birth to age 32: a photographic essay by her father.

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Glenn Greenwald over at Salon noticed something peculiar in a recently-released Fox News poll: The Democratic Congress is more popular amongst republicans than amongst democrats.

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Aeron Alfrey has drawn 1,000 beasts.

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McSweeney’s delivers again; Lit. 101 class in three lines or less:

1984

WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

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How Google’s MapReduce works, or How They Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Threw Lots of Hardware at The Problem.

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Bill Gates attempts to download MovieMaker, fails, and writes a glorious email:

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

Here’s what I don’t get. I’m fairly certain that if Steve Jobs went to download iTunes, and couldn’t, the entire Apple web team would be replaced in about two days.

Bill Gates, the richest man on earth, a guy who founded arguably the most powerful technology company we’ve yet seen, can’t figure out how to download his own company’s software and this is what happens:

When we were concluding our interview last week, I showed Gates a printout of the e-mail and asked if he ever got Movie Maker to work. Gates noted that Microsoft plans to include Movie Maker as part of Windows Live, so people will get the program when they download that online package.

Bill Gates gets the same answer we all get; “It’ll be fixed in the next version.”

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There are moments when I’m nothing but impressed with the Bush Administration’s ability to skirt the law:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

To quote a Senior Administration Official:

LALALALALA I can’t hear you!

Well, Mr. Second-Grade mentality, we voters would like to call you a doo-doo head:

A group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

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Returning to the web, seemingly out of nowhere, Matthew Harding has posted a new video of himself dancing around the world:

14 months in the making, 42 countries, and a cast of thousands. Thanks to everyone who danced with me.

Oddly amazing. See the original here.

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Ira Glass on getting better at creative work:

The most important thing you can do is just do alot of work.

Watch four parts of his interview on storytelling: Part 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Seems like there should be a Part 5, but it’s not on YouTube.

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Two new Mac-specific trojans are in the wild and boy-oh-boy do they sound … dull:

Two security firms have reported that two rate[sic] but dangerous in-the-wild trojans are attacking Mac operating system.

Not to undercut the seriousness of any security exploit within a modern operating system, but given that a Trojan requires a user to specifically open and execute a program, they’re not that dangerous. They’re non-viral usually, since infection is not automatic, and easy enough to stop. No real danger here.

The first and more dangerous, is a rare trojan … If a user has turned on Remote Management in the Sharing pane of System Preferences under Mac OS X 10.5, or if a user has installed Apple Remote Desktop client under Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier and has activated this setting in the Sharing preferences, the exploit will not function.

So turn on Remote Management and open strange files at will!

Intego also reported another trojan posing as a poker game. When the user attempts to launch the application, simply titled ‘PokerGame’, a dialog box appears asking for the machine’s administrator password.

Alright, this is not an exploit. It’s just a malicious application. I can write a two-line AppleScipt capable of deleting everything on your hard drive. If you’re stupid enough to launch said AppleScript, and provide it your administrative password, you’ve just given my little application everything it needs to do as much damage to your system as possible.

The sky is not falling. There is nothing to see here.

Do not open random files sent to you from untrusted sources. And certainly don’t give those applications administrative access. It’s just common sense folks.

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George Carlin has died.

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The untold story of the TiVo remote over at Gizmodo is worth a read, if only to soak in the amount of thought that went into designing the best remote you’ll ever use.

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Tom Brokaw will take over “Meet the Press”, at least through the election.

A non-controversial move, yes. But probably the best option in the bunch.

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Reihan Salam, on the “inequality” of campaign finance donation limits:

If George Soros or Michael Bloomberg wrote Obama a check for $500 million, he’d surely continue to build his more sustainable network of small donors. He’d also be able to buy hours of time on primetime network television to share his vision of America’s future. Or he could literally put a chicken in every pot, or create a series of Obama-themed daycare centers across the country, winning the support of stressed-out parents everywhere.

Salam’s point is not a new one. “Is money equal to speech” is an old question in politics and law. While there are numerous arguments for limiting donations, the primary argument for not boils down to individual liberty. It is deemed oppressive that a billionaire can not donate a vast sum to a political candidate of his choosing.

This misses the point of the law. The law is aimed to ensuring that candidates are not beholden to any large entities at the expense of the people they govern. If George Soros wrote you a check for $500 million, and he really wanted you to make clubbing baby seals legal, you’d probably find a way. By limiting the maximum contribution, you effectively democratize the process.

Justice Stephen Breyer said it a good deal better than I can:

To focus upon the First Amendment’s relation to the Constitution’s democratic objective is helpful because the campaign laws seek to further a similar objective. They seek to democratize the influence that money can bring to bear upon the electoral process, thereby building public confidence in that process, broadening the base of a candidate’s meaningful financial support, and encouraging greater public participation. Ultimately, they seek thereby to maintain the integrity of the political process - a process that itself translates political speech into governmental action. Insofar as they achieve these objectives, those laws, despite the limits they impose, will help to further the kind of open public political discussion that the First Amendment seeks to sustain, both as an end and as a means of achieving a workable democracy.

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Tata, India’s largest automotive company, is ready to begin production on the MiniC.A.T, a car powered by compressed air:

It costs less than one Euro per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car). Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km. The car has a top speed of 68 mph.

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An info-graphic from Xplane that details how Barack Obama fundamentally changed campaign financing.

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That’ll never work, a collection of quotes from relatively smart people dismissing relatively awesome technologies:

There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will. ~ Albert Einstein

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards for man-made sources. ~ Ronald Reagan

Let this be a lesson to us contrarians.

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What happens when an ambidextrous pitcher faces off against an ambidextrous hitter?

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Laser-cut typographic scarves.

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Scientist finds evidence of the “selfish gene”:

In studying genomes, the word ‘selfish’ does not refer to the human-describing adjective of self-centered behavior but rather to the blind tendency of genes wanting to continue their existence into the next generation.

Dawkin’s original book, now over 30 years old, is worth picking up - if you’re a biology nerd.

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The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has digitized a series of donated 16mm kinescope film recordings of The Mike Wallace Interview from the 1950s:

The bulk of these were 16mm kinescope film recordings, some of the earliest recordings of live television that were possible, and that survive today. Many of these have not been seen for over 50 years, and they represent a unique window into a turbulent time of American, and world history.

Be sure to watch Aldous Huxley, Salvador Dali and the oddly compelling Eldon Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

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Illegal downloaders will be barred from broadband access in France thanks to a brand-new, immensely retarded law:

“There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts.

Less you think this was a complete industry buy-out of a country’s legal process:

Under the accord, the entertainment industry will also drop existing copyright protection on French material so that music or videos bought legally online can be played on any sort of device.

This plus the Red Bull thing from earlier today doesn’t exactly make France look particularly friendly to us geek types.

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Video visualizations of the Gecko rendering engine figuring out just what mozilla.org, Wikipedia and Google should look like.

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Carl Ichan, Yahoo-proxy-fight-starting American billionaire, has a new blog where he rants about the problems plaguing corporate America. There’s something oddly compelling in reading the rants of a man who could buy and sell me:

Today our economy is in a major crisis. Many of our companies are incapable of competing. Additionally our banking system has issued mortgages that cannot and will not be paid back. Why did we get here? Because in corporate America there are no true elections. It is tyranny parading as democracy. It’s a poison running through the blood of corporate America.

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Spornography - that is porn created with the Spore Creature Creator - is perhaps the only thing we’ve invented stranger than japanese tentacle porn. Thanks, Geoff.

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