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