A TV news anchor and her colleague in Lebanon were both fired after they shared a few laughs on the air over the fate of an anti-Syrian politician who was assassinated last week.
The open microphone captured the presenter saying: “Why did it take them so long to kill him?” She [...]
Sy Hersh got the interview with General Anthony Taguba, the general who initially investigated abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Here he is describing a conversation he had with General John Abizaid:
I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me. I’d been in the Army thirty-two [...]
Thomas Vander Wal has written up an interesting post on recombining conversations split across multiple mediums. The problem:
We are seeing our communications move across channels, which can be good as this is fluid and keeping with our digital presence. More often than not we are seeing our communication streams fracture across channels. This [...]
I’ve been thinking lately that book reviews are a better investment than books in terms of attention, for a large class of books. Obviously for many books, the journey is the reward. Obviously, a review of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi will not yield the same rewards as reading the book. Indeed, there’s a good [...]
I wish there was a way to configure my Tivo so that if I hit the “go back 8 seconds” button, it would automatically turn on closed captioning for the eight seconds it replays.
One thing I’ve been predicting to everyone who’ll listen is that like deployment and scalability, serious IDE support is on the way for Ruby. Learn the language now, reap the benefits of better, easier tools down the road. Looks like that prediction is looking good right now. NetBeans is making serious progress on Ruby [...]
Bruce Schneier posted an essay today entitled Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot. He says:
I don’t think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker “terrorist.” But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don’t have to be competent [...]
Did you know that the NFL wanted to prohibit San Francisco 49ers coach Mike Nolan from wearing a suit or blazer on the sidelies when he coaches, and that only under duress did they submit to letting him wear a Reebok-approved suit during two games last year? They’ve restricted him to two games in [...]
Andrew Brown notes that he has misunderstood and misused Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. He explains:
I have thought for many years that the point of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was that you could not measure a system without disturbing it. Hence the idea that your measurement of one aspect (say, momentum) must disturb another, like position, [...]
Here’s a map of the United States with the names of the states replaced with the names of countries with a similar GDP. Pretty interesting reference when reading about other countries. I was surprised that Saudi Arabia and Tennessee have roughly the same GDP.