rc3.org Strong opinions weakly held

Posts Tagged ‘science’

Links from July 9th

In Commentary on 12 July 2009 tagged browsers, civil rights, health care, JavaScript, learning, links, science, torture, Web development with no comments

• Discover Magazine: The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State. Neuroscientists explain my usual state of mind.
• FireQuery. jQuery-specific enhancements for Firebug.
• The Zinn-Segaran Experiential Greatness Scale. You never know when this is going to come in handy.
• Bruce Schneier: The Pros and Cons of Password Masking. I think it all depends on the environment in which the password will be entered.
• Threat Level: Judge Acquits Lori Drew in Cyberbullying Case, Overrules Jury. This lady is a hateful loser, but making it a crime to violate a site's terms of service is awfully bad law.
• Shared Equity Mortgages. An interesting idea for people who don’t have enough money to make a down payment on their house.
• Vanity Fair: Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin. An awesome article that ran on Sarah Palin just before she resigned.
• Glenn Greenwald: The suppressed fact: Deaths by U.S. torture. In the discussions of torture, the number of people who were waterboarded is discussed frequently, the number of people in US custody who have died almost never is.
• O’Reilly Radar: Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard. Pretty amazing application of Drupal.
• O’Reilly Radar: Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt. There’s a whole other world out there I barely know exists.
• Firefox 3.5 for developers. The stuff you need to know.
• Scott Rosenberg: Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today. I thought it was a bad idea back then.
• Robert Reich: Why the Critics of a Public Option for Health Care Are Wrong. I’m not giving up on real health care reform.
• FiveThirtyEight: George F. Will Admits Public Option Will Cut Costs. At least half the stuff people are saying about health insurance isn’t true.
• Slate: Why do Iranian police uniforms say "police" in English? I was wondering.

Our place in the universe

In Commentary on 2 May 2009 tagged astronomy, science with 4 comments

I have no idea where this image illustrating the relative size of the Earth compared to other bodies in the universe came from, but it’s amazing.

I admit, I’m a total sucker for this sort of thing.

Links from March 23rd

In Commentary on 24 March 2009 tagged browsers, financial crisis, Java, JavaScript, links, open source, pdf, Ruby, science, Web development, World of Warcraft with no comments

There are a whole ton of links in the backlog today.

• xhtmlrenderer: The Flying Saucer Project. A tool to render HTML in PDF format (supports CSS).
• Antonio Cangiano: Ruby’s Biggest Challenge for 2009. A plea for Ruby developers to move to Ruby 1.9.1. Getting all of the libraries and Rails plugins updated is going to be a big job.
• Ajazxian: Richard Stallman: Free the Javascript. People make full of rms, but he is an extremist for a good cause. His radical stance in many ways frames a debate that is worth having.
• TV Guide: Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore Answers Our Burning Questionsm. I totally get the unhappiness with all of the deus ex machina aspects of the series finale, but I enjoyed it anyway.
• Thoughtbot: Testing Rake’s Integration. How to write integration tests for Rake tasks.
• Doug Bowman: Goodbye Google. Remarks on leaving Google. Nice reading for all of us who were never offered a job by Google.
• The Big Picture: Scenes from 30,000 meters above. High altitude photographs taken by a weather balloon launched by Spanish students.
• The Best Pictures from the BOREALIS Archives. Another student weather balloon project.
• Karl Martino: Here’s to dreaming big and doing it. More links relating to the weather balloon project.
• What they make: The highest paid chief executives in digital media. I’m surprised the CEO of Tivo makes more than the CEO of Netflix.
• WoW Insider: Authenticator app coming to iPhones, iPods, and other mobile devices. Blizzard is expanding the authentication options that prevent World of Warcraft account theft.
• FiveThirtyEight: Why AIG Paid the “Bonuses”. Most interesting remarks I’ve read on this topic.
• istartedsomething: Expression Web SuperPreview makes cross-browser testing like moist delicious cake. Seems like a major advance in cross-browser testing.
• Laughing Meme: Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors. Insightful remarks on the Facebook redesign.
• New York Times: Hadoop, Analytical Software, Finds Uses Beyond Search. I still don’t understand MapReduce as well as I should.
• Antonio Cangiano: Introducing Redis: a fast key-value database. Still looking for the right project to use this technology for.
• The Annotated Watchmen. For after I finish the graphic novel.

Links from March 12th

In Commentary on 12 March 2009 tagged cars, community, content management, css, design, drupal, links, performance, science, security, user experience with 1 comment

• Kurt Cagle: Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal? The real question being asked is whether the features associated with dynamic database-driven Web sites are more compelling than the pinpoint control and top notch user experience of Dreamweaver.
• Pathfinder Development: Keeping Up With The Joneses: Keeping Rails and its extensions up to date. Managing dependencies is generally one of the most unpleasant aspects of any software development project.
• Eric Burke: Ban Software Patents. Yet another example of ludicrous patents.
• Michael Ruhlman: Michael Symon’s Pickled Chillis. Really cool recipe.
• Serial Consign: Desktop Deja Vu. The history of the default desktop picture that shipped with Windows XP.
• useum: Measuring Social Participation in a Science Museum. Useful for more than just museums.
• Wired: The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist. Looks fascinating but I’m not reading it ’til my Wired comes in the mail.
• High Performance Web Sites: Performance Impact of CSS Selectors. Hard numbers on the varying performance of different CSS selectors. Also a reminder that there’s a lot more we could be measuring that we don’t.
• oobject: formula 1 user interfaces. Incredibly fascinating comparison of the current state of steering wheels in Formula 1 cars.
• PC Pro Blog: I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying. Another argument that high end page-based authoring tools are giving way to Drupal.

Links from January 29th

In Commentary on 30 January 2009 tagged drupal, evolution, food, games, links, religion, Ruby on Rails, science with no comments

These links are for the past three days.

• fudgestudios’s bort at master – Skeleton Ruby on Rails project with a common set of plugins already baked in. I need to create a version of this for myself.
• Michael Ruhlman: Anti-Bacterial America. An inspired rant about Americans becoming germophobes and the implications of that transition.
• Aten Design Group: On Becoming a Drupal Development Shop. I’m fascinated by a company tying itself so closely to one tool.
• Jason Kottke: More on Candy Land. Pointers to an interesting discussion on the value of Candy Land as a game.
• The Guardian: Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God.
• rentzsch’s clicktoflash at master. New home of the Safari plugin that blocks Flash movies.
• Jack: Rack for JavaScript. Because it’s there.
• Al Arabiya: Obama tells Al Arabiya peace talks should resume. The first big interview of the Obama presidency goes to the Arab media.
• Marc Lynch: Obama to Arabs: “what you’ll see is someone who is listening”. Analysis of Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya.
• The CMS Myth.
• mezzoblue: Sprite Optimization. A very cool technique that I just learned about.
• FiveThirtyEight.com: Just Five Red States Left? This is a map we can believe in.
• Media Matters: O’Reilly don’t know much about (WWII) history. Jessica Alba knows more geography than Bill O’Reilly. Not surprising.
• Dr. Saturday: Hug your friendly neighborhood recruiting rankings. In light of the recent articles on talking about how hard it is to project the performance of professional football players based on college performance, it’s interesting that the performance of college teams can be predicted fairly accurately by the quality of their recruiting classes.
• How to Choose Chart Types. Very useful resource for determining which kind of chart to use to visualize data.

Tobacco companies more evil than you thought

In Commentary on 16 May 2008 tagged corporate malfeasance, science with 3 comments

Tobacco companies found themselves facing the need to argue that some of the scientific evidence used to support laws banning smoking in public places is “junk science“, but quickly realized that a campaign focused on tobacco-related research would be dismissed as transparently self-serving. So they instead spent their money to a create propaganda campaign that attacked scientific research on many fronts, including research that supported smoking bans. The end result? The execrable Web site JunkScience.com. I’m sure John Stossel fits in here somewhere as well.

Links for March 31

In Commentary on 31 March 2008 tagged browsers, economics, history, links, politics, science, The Media with no comments

• Jason Kottke: Our collective recent history, online. A collection of magazine archives available online. Putting archives online is cheap, and you can put ads on old stuff just like you can
• jwz: Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!. Everybody is linking to this, but who cares? jwz has put the original Mozilla Communications home page online. I didn’t know that the old Netscape style of making the first letter in every word really big went back to day one.
• Josh Marshall: Stickin’. This is a brilliant piece of political analysis. As the Democratic nominating process has proceeded, Hillary’s chances of being the nominee have decreased. As her chances decrease, she must necessarily make increasingly extreme claims to justify remaining in the race. Now her argument is that Obama cannot beat McCain in November. What Josh doesn’t say is that the surest way for that to be true is for the Clinton campaign to make it true. Expect things to continue to get uglier.
• Chris Blattman: Holy evaluation. I love everything about this blog post.