send email
Atom 1.0Archives
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
Whole Foods' response to "The Omnivore's Dilemna" — Why is it that I had never heard of this book until today? (via Mark McClusky)
The sorriest confession you've ever seen — Farcical investigations don't help stop terrorism.
Rogers Cadenhead outsources his weblog — He's turned the reins over to a 23 year old programmer/journalist in India for the week.
Slashdot is about to get prettier, cleaner, and faster — CSS-based redesign notwithstanding, I probably still won't go back to reading it.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sucks at being corrupt — He needs to pay closer attention to his Republican counterparts if he ever hopes to succeed.
Steve Silberman on the death of home chemistry — A sad sign of the times.
Wikipedia article on hip hop rivalries — Someday the Web will consist entirely of online stores, Wikipedia, and Google.
Sam Ruby's new captcha system — It should kill most comment spambots.
NY Times profile of Col Needham, the founder of IMDB — I've been using the site for about 10 years and never knew the first thing about him.
Words that can be easily typed with just the left hand — The longest is "stewardesses". I thought everybody knew that.
Second rate Foreign Policy article on open source — Perhaps such articles should be assigned to computer experts rather than international policy experts.
Google has a new design czar — I look forward to the results.
Scott Rosenberg: Now that Gregg Easterbrook has admitted defeat on global warming, he should shut up — Couldn't agree more.
The Iranian government has not mandated a special dress code for non-Muslims — This completely false story was written by a propagandist agitating for war with Iran.
Slate political writer John Dickerson says Al Gore can't win in 2008 — I agree with him that Gore probably wouldn't even want the job.
Tom DeLay supporters cite Stephen Colbert — I guess they didn't learn from the religious group that cited an Onion article to support the assertion that Harry Potter is Satanic?
SmackBook — Virtual desktops? Check. Built in motion sensor? Check. Let the UI innovation commence.
Craig Newmark vs. Mike McCurry on net neutrality — Let the framing begin! (Or continue, anyway.)
An interesting Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment — Someone paid two cents apiece for 10,000 hand drawn sheep via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Some of the sheep are pretty decent for two cents.
Apple and Nike: NIKE+ — Do I need this? No. Do I think it's incredibly cool? Yes.
The global warming debate is mostly over — WorldChanging is working on a page that succinctly and thoroughly refutes the most common spurious contrarian arguments.
The dog whisperer, threat or menace? — Malcolm Gladwell revises and extends his article about Cesar Millan, addressing whether his methods are valid. Don't miss the comments.
National Geographic visits ANWR — ANWR has been described by legislators who want to drill for oil there as a "frozen desert." National Geographic sent in a reporter to take a look.
Your next great dinner discussion — This Marginal Revolution post should launch a thousand great discussions.
Two-finger right clicking on a 15" MacBook Pro — This feature is enabled on the MacBook and the 17" MacBook Pro already -- a patch to enable it on the 15" MacBook Pro.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden has a non-review of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" — Every time I read about this movie I think that Al Gore should be our next President.
Our President is a moron — According to President Bush, we need to set aside the most important question as regards global warming. Idiot.
Malcolm Gladwell reviews "The Wages of Wins" — NBA sabermetrics.
Some general rules concerning sports performance — Payroll and wins are not strongly correlated, believe it or not.
Wired News publishes full text of AT&T-NSA documents — The link to the documents is a 404 right now, but they should be up sometime today. (Here's a direct link to a PDF of the documents.)
Bruce Schneier on privacy as a fundamental right — A must read.
Hosting review sites take cash for ratings — Having looked at them recently, I can't say that this revelation surprises me.
Hydroelectic power and global warming — Hydroelectric power doesn't create air pollution but it does produce lots of greenhouse gases.
Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life! — The latest absurdities from the global warming naysayers.
We live in a society of morons — It's sad but indisputable.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the militarization of our borders — It's a stupid and dangerous idea.
US Marines intentionally killed civilians in Haditha, Iraq — How I wish this story weren't true.
Global warming, it's a good thing! — Transcript of 1992 appearance on Crossfire by a global warming denier/promoter who shills for the oil industry.
Tyler Cowen makes a contrarian argument on executive pay — Sorry, Tyler, but only someone who has never worked in corporate America could assert that "it is not obvious that the American system of executive pay is excessive or broken."
Big oil is spending cash to run ads attacking Al Gore — Using one of the many bogus "institutes" that supply lies in exchange for donations as a proxy.
Yet another example of the uncanny valley — I still think World of Warcraft was made cartoonish to avoid this phenomenon.
Nice network neutrality article from TidBits — It describes the issues at hand very well.
The longest six months of his life — FAIR catches up with Tom Friedman's stupid pundit tricks.
Derek Powazek: don't mindlessly copy Google — Sage advice.
Economic consensus on immigration — Submitted to the President via open letter by economists from across the philosophical spectrum.
Detailed comparison of MacBook vs MacBook Pro — The biggest difference aside from screen size is that the MacBook Pro has a much nicer graphics adapter.
Digital cameras and raw format — The sample that shows the image quality difference with raw versus JPEG is compelling.
Lactic acid is a good thing — A huge blow to conventional wisdom. (Via Dangerousmeta)
Siva Vaidhyanathan on network neutrality — The point about double billing is the bottom line on this debate. (Via Boing Boing)
Apple's Intel consumer laptops are announced — Is it just me, or do they compare very well with the MacBook Pro in terms of performance? Very nice.
Using the National Guard for border security is a bad idea — Here's why.
Is the government spying on reporters to uncover confidential sources? — That's the rumor.
Defense correspondent Joe Galloway vs Pentagon flack Larry Di Rita — Galloway makes some good points, but thinking about our current struggle as part of a 100 year war against Islam is dangerous and misguided.
Book publishing stats that confirm the existence of the long tail — Courtesy of O'Reilly.
My favorite idea of the day — Use lottery proceeds to fund personal retirement accounts.
Moronic right winger smacked down by English prof — He asserted that "whistleblower" is an unnecessary synonym for traitor.
Tyler Cowen on why the loss of indie booksellers is not a tragedy — I confess that while I like the idea of independent bookstores, I almost always buy books from Amazon.com.
Straight from the horse's pen — The prosecutor in the Valerie Plame outing case has filed a copy of the op-ed by Joseph Wilson that was marked up by Dick Cheney himself.
Martin Fowler's Ruby endorsement — For certain classes of applications, I definitely think that Ruby on Rails provides an edge over Java/J2EE.
Something President Bush and I agree on — He says his best moment since becoming President was catching a big perch on his lake.
Slouching toward total cleptocracy — Is our current government so corrupt that they no longer realize that when you break the law you should try to keep it a secret?
This is the most compelling ad ever — What company wouldn't want to be able to publish an ad like this? (I know the Beemer folks must love jamming their thumb in Daimler-Benz's eye.)
Simon St Laurent's wise observation on AJAX — Put me in group one. Front end development that puts you at the pointy end of Web browser inconsistencies is misery.
Zacarias Moussaoui channels The Onion — If he weren't a crazy, would-be mass murderer, he'd actually be funny.
pb on findling lost URLs — I hate it when I can't find my way back to a page that I found useful.
Flickr set of reaction shots from the audience at Colbert's speech — Judge for yourself whether people were amused.
Jason Levine on why Six Apart's web sites crashed — A shady anti-spam company got DOSed and dumped the problem on Six Apart by pointing their host name at a TypePad server.
New York really is more dog eat dog than Raleigh, NC — In Raleigh I've never had a server try to trick me into buying bottled water I didn't want.
Andrew Leonard on worker migration in the EU — I mentioned the EU in my post on immigration the other day -- free migration of workers has not turned out to be bad for EU nations at all.
The idiocy and viciousness of anti-immigrant sentiment — Fred Clark captures it well.
Bruce Schneier: Who owns your computer? — Everybody wants to control how you use it these days.
Paul Graham: The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn — None of them are a revelation, but it's nice to have them all in one place.
Mr Jalopy on Maker Faire — This post is the embodiment of many of the things that are good about the world.
Establishing network neutrality without screwing things up — Cory Doctorow has some thoughts on how a regulatory solution may make things worse, not better.
Onion AV Club summer movie rundown — The article is almost certainly more entertaining than any of the movies discussed.
Tim Berners-Lee is in favor of network neutrality — Least surprising thing I've read today.
Juan Cole responds to Christopher Hitchens' sideswipe — Writing a column about something a professor writes on a private mailing list is really pathetic.
How the Defense Department used propaganda in the Iraq war — Today's nausea-inducing selection.
Shorter Wired News: Hate Declan McCullagh, not us — Believe me, I do.
Tom Coates on wasting time in World of Warcraft — I love World of Warcraft, but regret the time I spend playing because it's a waste.
White House confirms Stephen Colbert pissed them off — It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Why network neutrality matters — Slate's Tim Wu explains in terms anybody can understand.
Historical context of yesterday's May Day boycott — Why it's important that the immigrant movement held its protest on a workday.
Fixing MacBook Pro heat issues by applying your own thermal paste — I'm not sure I have the guts to do this myself.
Why Colbert matters — Tim Grieve comments for Salon.
80 year old illiterate Afghan held at Gitmo — To whom is he supposed to be a threat?
The secrets of the Google cafeteria — The good food attracts employees, the large tables force them to eat lunch with people they don't already know.
Malcolm Gladwell on plagiarism — Interesting analysis.
Can we add Colin Powell to the retired general list? — He says we invaded Iraq with too few troops. Thanks again for that speech at the UN, Colin. You really screwed us.
Billmon contrasts Colbert's speech with American Dreamz — Nice, thinky piece.
Bush to Congress: enforcing laws as written is for chumps — President Bush has claimed the authority to disobey 750 laws since taking office. Your nausea-inducing story for the day.
The truth is out there — The Sunlight Foundation aims to use freely available Web resources to track government corruption.
Annotated tech bookshelf — I should do one of these, although mine would probably be less interesting. (Via Laughing Meme)
thankyoustephencolbert.org — I thought that it was amazing that Stephen Colbert said the things he said with the President sitting a few feet to his right.