An interview with Michael Hanlon on his new book Ten questions science can’t answer (Yet!). Lots of interestings bits scattered throughout. On animal sentience:
People used to put pigs on trial for murder in the Middle Ages.
On what society should do with the stupid:
…some people get perversely offended if you suggest that there are innate differences in human abilities. I don’t understand why that’s so. I think people are uncomfortable about talking about genetic difference in humans, there’s all sorts of horrible eugenics implications, but it’s common sense that obviously not everybody is the same.
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Jordan Bunnell has posted step-by-step directions on hacking a Verizon EVDO modem into the Macbook Air chassis. Jealous.
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A poorly-executed, but still interesting look at super hero themes in high fashion. The future is slowly arriving.
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While “fill the cup” might be a terrible tag line in the wake of the video-that-shall-not-be-named, take a moment and give to the World Food Program. The food crisis has taxed their coffers:
Short of cash, the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that feeds the world’s poorest people, can no longer supply 450,000 Cambodian children with a daily breakfast of domestically grown rice supplemented by yellow split peas from the United States and tuna from Thailand.
This won’t be the only program to go away as food prices continue to rise. And because I like to set a good example.
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Turns out we’re not number one in gun violence:
Although America accounts for 40% of firearms in civilian ownership, people put them to more deadly use elsewhere. The gun murder rate in Colombia and South Africa, for example, is much higher than in America.
Take that Mr. Moore!
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Albert Hoffman, inventor of LSD, is dead:
In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”
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Oh for fuck’s sake, just throw a dinner party. Webcam wine-tastings are officially creepier than anything Chris Hansen has done.
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The iPodObserver has a leaked “photo” of the rumored second-generation iPhone:
If the image proves to be legit, however, the glossy black finish will make a nice addition to the up-and-coming executive’s tech stash.
When was the last time a “leaked” photo of a rumored Apple product ended up being legit?
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CSS variables have all the markings of a brilliant idea:
For those that have never considered the idea, here’s why variables would be so useful: imagine you have a common font-color declaration that you apply to all sorts of elements in your stylesheet; using a variable you could define the color once, making it much easier to change in the future.
The idea comes partially from David Hyatt, of WebKit fame, and if implemented, would save developers hours of time and make style sheets easier to maintain and share. Like most CSS advances, without a serious push by the community, we’ll likely only see a decent implementation in WebKit.
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Transparency is generally a great idea, and the Transparency in Government Act 2008 seeks to make the US government as transparent as possible:
The draft legislation is an amalgamation of bills that have already been introduced, along with new provisions. If enacted, it would create historic changes in the way the executive and legislative branches provide information to the public, and Sunlight believes it would foster a better and more complete understanding by the public of how the government works.
You can comment on any section of the law. Nifty.
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Jason Snell of Macworld dug up some screenshots of the famously-never-delivered Apple operating system Copland:
But as I waded through the old files, what struck me was one of the promised features of Copland I had completely forgotten: an automated backup system that now resonates as a first hint of the Time Machine to come.
What struck me was how well the Platinum interface has aged.
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The greatest keyboard you’ll ever own:
Computer users who crave the feel of Apple and IBM’s quality keyboards of 15 or 20 years ago will love the Tactile Pro 2.0. Unlike other keyboards made today, each key on the Tactile Pro 2.0 is built on an individual Matias Mechanical Keyswitch.
Unlike modern keyboards, which seem to throw away actual tactile response in favor of a soft, quiet, you-don’t-even-know-you’re-typing feel, the Matias provides real feedback. It’s as close to writing on a type writer as you can get.
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Your start-up is a vanity project. Do something real:
If you’re a revolutionary, then be one: put your money where your mouth is, and fix a big problem that changes the world for the better - if you really have the courage, the purpose, and the vision, that is.
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Despite food prices being up, to the point where folks are rioting over possible starvation, Congress thinks farmers need help:
A five-year, nearly $300 billion farm bill emerging on Capitol Hill appears to fall short of President Bush’s goal of making big cuts in subsidies to affluent farmers.
Under a tentative agreement reached by key members of the House and Senate, the bill would make only modest changes in support for farmers.
Must be an election year.
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A gas-tax holiday is completely useless pandering:
“It’s basic economics,” said Leonard Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan thinktank. “Gas is always in very short supply during the summer, which is why prices go up. In order to reduce the price, you would have to increase supply, but that is difficult over the short term, because the refineries cannot add capacity.”
Barack Obama, who voted for the Illinois temporary moratorium back in 2000, seems to have learned his lesson:
Barack Obama opposes it (as does George Bush), saying his experience with a similar move in Illinois shows that the oil companies won’t pass the savings on to consumers, and it won’t encourage conservation.
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Everyone loves 10 year-old boys, even the criminally insane:
In the late ’90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy.
Charles Manson’s responses are… well they are very Manson:
oh well I’m just playing clown words to say I didn’t forgit Hellbilly—Bill we always had good days + I’m glad your gonna be a D.A. Be one who works for justice + not one who wants to win win + and don’t care if people didn’t do rong
And Clarence Thomas apparently loves Egg McMuffins.
PJ pointed out something I completely missed. Richard Ramirez, a man who raped and/or killed some 25 people in Los Angeles, has collateral and a logo.
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A possible serial killer, a smiley-face, and the comfort of far-fetched reasons:
Could a national gang of killers that leaves smiley-face calling cards be getting away with murdering dozens of male college students by making all the deaths look like accidents?
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Medical marijuana, and organ transplant lists:
Timothy Garon’s face and arms are hauntingly skeletal, but the fluid building up in his abdomen makes the 56-year-old musician look eight months pregnant.
His liver, ravaged by hepatitis C, is failing. Without a new one, his doctors tell him, he will be dead in days.
But Garon has been refused a spot on the transplant list, largely because he has used marijuana, even though it was legally approved for medical reasons.
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Test-tube chickens, or life imitating Margaret Atwood.
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Showing a dictator the door:
What lessons can be learned from past attempts to oust seemingly immovable oppressors? Do the lessons apply in the case of Zimbabwe? What are the options for dealing with Mr. Mugabe?
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The computational capacity of the universe:
Merely by existing, all physical systems register information. And by
evolving dynamically in time, they transform and process that information.
The laws of physics determine the amount of information that a physical system can register and the number of elementary logic operations that a system can perform.
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The vanishing personal site:
We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments.
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Where Pixish feared to thread, 99designs rushed in:
Getting something designed at 99designs is easy. We help you run a “design contest”, where thousands of designers compete to create the best possible design to meet your needs. All you need is a clear idea of what you want designed and how much you’re prepared to pay for it.
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Why are so many developers such utter shit?
So, you have customers who accept complete crap; managers who don’t know what their teams are doing; and teams who are desperately trying to hide what they’re doing from management, and, of which only 33% (at the most) of the team are doing productive work.
Seems to be a side-effect of following R.H.Grant’s advice:
When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are.
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Why your brain likes money, but prefers status:
New research shows for the first time that we process cash and social values in the same part of our brain (the striatum)—and likely weigh them against one another when making decisions. So what’s more important—money or social standing? It might be the latter, according to two new studies published in the journal Neuron.
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Collection of vintage logos from a mid-70’s edition of the book World of Logotypes.
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Font bots from Jonathon Yule. I’m a little in love with the Futura one.
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UK man dresses up like Darth Vader, beats up “Star Wars” nerds:
A UK man has confessed to dressing up like Darth Vader and attacking two men who founded a church based on Jedi teachings. He beat them with a crutch, but to be fair, they were asking for it: The victims had been playing with light sabers and filming themselves while doing so.
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Ruby symbols are not just pretty strings:
If you’ve ever written a program you’ve probably heard that “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Well, that doesn’t mean you should ignore performance considerations entirely. As Ezra Zygmuntowicz says, “Postmature optimization is the root of all hosting bills.” If cutting corners means you can get your code written faster, then by all means throw performance to the wind and write code at warp speed. But why incur a performance penalty when you get nothing for it?
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Innovating our way out of the food crisis and the hope that the whole “people are starving” problem might help to end people’s ridiculous aversion to genetically modified crops:
What does the future hold? The IMF’s prophecy of mass starvation will undoubtedly go the way of the earlier prophets of gloom and doom. A medium- and long-term benefit of high commodity prices may be that the governments in poor countries will be able to justify the testing and commercialization of critical gene-spliced food crops such as rice and wheat. Countries like China have this new technology ready to go, and the licensing of gene-spliced rice and wheat will quickly boost yields, and because of better insect, disease and weed control, reduce the costs of production.
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A profile of Li Yang, a Tony Robbins-esque figure in China who sells the same personal-power sugar water with a nice mixture of jingoistic sentiment and Western paranoia. By teaching them English:
He is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement. He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”
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The next version of MySQL Enterprise Edition may include paid-only features:
It’s emerged Sun may release extra data back-up features in the Enterprise Edition of the next version of MySQL, due in Q4, to paying enterprise subscribers only.
Apparently, some people think the end times are nigh:
I used to be one of MySQL’s vociferous defenders, arguing that speed, ease of use, quality of documentation, and the size of the community made up for its limitations relative to PostgreSQL. But this is pretty much the end. Sun is clearly determined to destroy whatever’s good about it.
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Billionaire to set up magazine for snobs:
“It’s for people who are successful and those who want to be successful,” said Andrei Shmarov, who will run Snob.
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Where did all the bingo players go?. Apparently, they’re at home. Smoking them tobacco cigarettes:
In Minnesota, which adopted a statewide ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces in October, revenue from all charity gambling dropped nearly 13 percent in the last quarter of 2007, compared to the same quarter the year before, according to state officials. More than half of the drop — the equivalent of about $100 million annually — was attributed to the new law, they said.
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