March 2009
58 posts
Number of Web search engines devoted to the Harper’s Index: 1. Find it here:http://is.gd/lfQV
13-Year-Old wows conservative convention →
I wonder how many friends this kid has. Of course, it won’t matter in 2012 when Jindal selects him as a running mate.
Louisiana to seek New Orleans-Baton Rouge... →
Sometimes the news is funny:
BATON ROUGE - Louisiana’s transportation department plans to request federal dollars for a New Orleans to Baton Rouge passenger rail service from the same pot of railroad money in the president’s economic stimulus package that Gov. Bobby Jindal criticized as unnecessary pork on national television Tuesday night.
February 2009
46 posts
Sign of the times, or bogus trend?: Violence between repo men and their targets (the repossessed?) is on the rise. http://is.gd/l7wi
Play back an essay as it's being written →
Etherpad is a collaboration app that saves keystrokes as you write. They’ve just added a feature that lets you play back prose as it was written. It’s mesmerizing: you see the sentences burst forth, then shrink down, you see little thoughts emerge into big ideas, you see wild asides whittled down to little footnotes.
This example is venture capitalist Paul Graham’s essay on...
Pork brains: How to get a lot of cholesterol very... →
Consumerist calls Pork Brains in Milk Gravy the worst food product ever. Well, maybe, but 1170 percent of your daily value of cholesterol in just a 2/3 cup serving size is hard to beat.
The “Save the SF Chronicle” Facebook group has just 18 members. The problem in a nutshell? http://is.gd/kROk
My fiancé put hot sauce in his used condoms.... →
A letter to Cary Tennis asks:
We were walking the dog and talking about his brother’s unkind, manipulative girlfriend who seems willing to do anything to get married. He mentioned that he’d heard some radio show host advise his listeners to add hot sauce to the contents of their used condoms, or to rinse them out entirely before disposal so sneaky women could not use them to get...
The best 11-minute explanation of the financial... →
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
Slum in "Slumdog Millionaire" not really a slum →
Urban planning experts Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava write that Dharavi, the Mumbai “slum” in Slumdog Millionaire isn’t really a slum:
The imagery represents what most middle-class residents of Mumbai (and now all over the world) imagine Dharavi to be. The urban legend of its squalor has taken root because few Mumbaikers have ever been there — just as most...
Verdict on Starbucks’ instant: “It might literally make you gag.” http://is.gd/khQn
Socks the cat, dead at 20. http://is.gd/kjz7
Oops!Upcoming U2 album accidentally leaked by Universal Music. You can find it on your favorite file-sharing site. http://is.gd/kdCq
Watch
WatchCollege Humor does Christian Bale.
Slow cooked an egg: 65 degree water bath (celsius, insanely closely monitored), with constant circulation thanks to my milk frother. Tasty!
You know who we don’t hear from anymore? George W. Bush. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?
There's no rule saying you can't take photos in... →
Even though there’s no rule saying you can’t take photos on subways in New York, the transit police routinely pretend there is — resulting in a lot of money lost for the city. Jim Dwyer has one man’s story:
Mr. Taylor — a college student and an employee of a transportation agency that he did not want to identify — said he had been stopped before when taking pictures,...
Chimp owner points out that people go crazy too →
The owner of Travis, the chimpanzee who mauled a woman and was then killed by the police, points out that people go crazy too. This story is unexpectedly sad:
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Apple Says iPhone jailbreaking is illegal →
Apple has taken its first formal stance on “jailbreaking” iPhones—liberating your phone so that it can run applications not sold in the iTunes App store. In comments filed with the Copyright Office, Apple says jailbreaking is a violation of copyright law.
Here’s Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Apple’s copyright infringement claim starts...
Courts block efforts to open up their documents →
Documents produced by the government are not copyrighted; they’re in the public domain. So it should be easy to get any document in federal court. But it’s not.
The federal government uses an old-school electronic system called Pacer to provide access to rulings, briefs and other documents. Pacer isn’t easy to use and it charges 8 cents per page for download — which adds...
The New York Times' article skimmer →
I’ve written often about the main thing I miss about print newspapers—they’re easy to skim. You can go through the paper in 20 minutes and get a full day’s news; doing the same thing on the Web takes much longer.
I’m glad to see the New York Times is thinking of ways to address this. Here’s their new “article skimmer” Web interface. It shows you...
Baby-faced 13-year-old boy becomes a dad →
Cute overload!!!
Reporter: What will you do financially?
Alfie: What’s “financially”?
Obama, swearing. http://is.gd/jevX
Barack Obama: "You ain't my bitch, nigga!" →
April Winchell went and did something you’d think would have been done long ago — assembled the swearing parts of the Dreams of my Father audiobook into Web-playable clips. The result is quite fun. Here are three of them:
“You ain’t my bitch, nigga — buy your own damn fries.”
“You know that guy ain’t shit — sorry ass motherfucker got...
Odd: If you lie to someone in Congress, you can go to jail. But if someone in Congress lies to you…. http://is.gd/jddw
Does the Kindle 2's text-to-speech infringe... →
Amazon’s new Kindle reader can read back a book to you out loud in a computer voice. On hearing that, Paul Aiken, who heads the Authors Guild, said, “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud — that’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
Which of course sounded ridiculous!
But as Engadget’s Nilay Patel points out in a...
"Basically Cod Semen" →
From Frank Bruni’s very positive review of April Bloomfield’s new restaurant, The John Dory:
There are nervy surprises. For a while Ms. Bloomfield served pan-fried milt, which is basically cod semen, its flavor and texture not unlike that of sweetbreads. She blasted it with capers and butter, which is also how she blasts its replacement for the time being, monkfish liver, served...
The Saudi Gazette: They should call it the WTF... →
Apparently the Saudi Gazette publishes online. Good thing, too, because how else would you have learned about the businessman who violated all kinds of strictures by holding a mixed-gender party in his theme park. Yes, his theme park:
MAKKAH – The District Court here on Monday enhanced the sentence of a businessman who was found guilty of organizing a mixed-gender party in his theme park.
...
WatchSony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Sh*t, via Buzz Feed.
Op-Ed Contributor - You Can’t Sell News by the... →
Kinsley makes the crucial point in regard to the various calls for news organizations to institute a “micropayments” scheme for content: Nobody pays for content now, and newspapers don’t make any money selling content!
Yes, you buy the newspaper, but the paper is selling it to you at a loss — the newsprint costs the newspaper more than you’re paying, let alone the...
WatchHere’s Bill Gates great TED presentation, the one in which he sets mosquitoes free in the room. “There’s no reason only poor people should have this experience,” he says.
Great achievements in American socialism →
A cheeky Salon slideshow of pictures of some the bridges, dams and other historic sites built by money from FDR’s New Deal programs.
Christian Bale's defense: The DP was a "light... →
Aint it Cool News’ Harry Knowles says that he knows a guy who knows a guy who says that there was a perfectly reasonable reason for Christian Bale’s temper tantrum on the set of Terminator Salvation: The director of photography he was yelling at was a total “light tweaker.” Meaning he liked to fiddle with the lights, thus breaking Bale’s concentration during a scene...
David Allen is holding the first-ever Getting Things Done conference. How much can you get done at a conference? http://tinyurl.com/6btczz
Donating a kidney through your vagina or rectum →
William Saletan writes:
Good news: You can now get a kidney from a vagina.
The kidney doesn’t start in the vagina, of course. That’s just where it comes out. For several years, doctors have been learning how to do this. It’s called “transvaginal nephrectomy” or, more broadly, “natural orifice” surgery. They cut the kidney loose and pull it through...
Recession Makes Restaurants Eager to Serve You →
“If you eat out regularly in New York, you’ve noticed a different reception, an altered mood,” Frank Bruni writes. “Extreme solicitousness tinged with outright desperation.”
Bruni goes over the many ways in which restaurants have hugged him lately — reservationists begged him to come another night when one night was booked, hosts greeted him as if he were an old...
WatchLil’ O’Reilly on Obama’s first days in office. (via Alex Koppelman.)
NYT op-ed influenced Daschle decision →
NBC reports that Tom Daschle decided to drop out of his bid for HHS secretary in response to an editorial in the NYT:
Tom Daschle told NBC News that he called President Obama this morning after reading the New York Times editorial calling for the withdrawal of Daschle’s nomination.
I’ve often had a good feeling when reading editorials I’ve agreed with recently — hey,...
I LEGO N.Y. →
Christoph Niemann used Lego pieces to make whimsical illustrations of New York City. I like this one, too: