Posts

I’ve plowed into Scott Rosenberg’s new history of blogging, Say Everything and finished the first half of the book today. It’s pretty clear to me that this book will be seen one day as incredibly important. This is the first history book I’ve ever read (and could very well be the last) that describes events that I observed very closely. Scott does a great job of filling in the backstories for those events. Nothing in the book rings patently false or wrong to me, and that’s the highest compliment I can pay. ...

Like many, I’ve been obsessively following the news out of Iran since the elections last Friday. What I haven’t done is cheer on the protesters in Iran. First, let me say that I wish for Iranians what I wish for everyone – a government that is accountable to the people and that protects the rights of all its citizens. And I hope that they can put a decent, democratic government in place with as little bloodshed as possible. Regardless of whether or not the election was rigged, the actions of the Iranian government since the election have been those of the authoritarian dictatorship. The Iranian government lacks the legitimacy in the eyes of its people to conduct a fair election, and that’s true regardless of the real vote totals, which are unlikely to ever be known. ...

Let’s say you have a report that has some filter controls on top that let you narrow the scope of the report. When the report loads, the filter is collapsed. The user opens the filter, changes some of the settings, and submits the form. What is the preferred method for determining whether the filter should be displayed? A related question is whether you should detect the filter’s visibility status in JavaScript or you should check on the server side and use the style attribute to control visibility. ...

The Iranian government (or its supporters) are starting to use Twitter to spread disinformation. ABC News reports on a Twitter user who is retweeting items from their correspondent that he didn’t write. Marc Ambinder’s suggestion that people think like a CIA analyst is worth remembering.

Yesterday I posted a link to Atul Gawande’s commencement address at the University of Chicago Medical School. It’s a must-read on the subject of health insurance, but he makes a point in the middle that I think is worth calling out and discussing on its own. He discusses a charitable organization that worked to improve childhood nutrition in Vietnam: They went to villages in trouble and got the villagers to help them identify who among them had the best-nourished children—who among them had demonstrated what Jerry Sternin termed a “positive deviance” from the norm. The villagers then visited those mothers at home to see exactly what they were doing. ...

Telegraph (UK): US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive. I appreciate the realistic approach to dealing with the massive shrinkage some cities have undergone. IE6 denial message for Momentile.com on Flickr. Brilliant. Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address. This is the argument that naturally flows from his important article on health care costs. Look for a separate blog post on positive deviants. Economix Blog: What Is ‘Socialized Medicine’?: A Taxonomy of Health Care Systems. Single payer, nationalized health care, and a public health insurance provider are all very, very different things. Financial Times: First Person: Frank Ahearn. Former skip tracer advises people on how to disappear. Smashing Magazine: Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs. Who doesn’t love fonts? James Fallows: Belatedly, on the Cairo speech & Obama rhetoric in general. A short explanation of how Obama differs from other politicians. Anil Dash: The End of Fail. Anil Dash really is the conscience of the blogosphere. The comments on this piece are really telling. Roger Ebert: The O’Reilly Procedure. A damning critique of Bill O’Reilly. Matthew Bass: Auto timeout sessions in Rails. I hate this feature but some applications demand it.

I’ve been watching the big fight over a brief the Department of Justice filed in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. During the campaign, President Obama promised to support the repeal of the act, but the Solicitor General is defending the law in the face of a legal challenge. This has led to much drama. Here’s the thing. When President Bush was in office, liberals were rightfully outraged at the politicization of the Justice Department. The Bush administration regularly broke the law and defied convention in its dealings with Justice, which relies on its independence from the White House to operate effectively. Now we see some of the same critics attacking President Obama because it’s their ox being gored. When President Bush is putting political pressure on the Department of Justice to provide legal cover for a torture program, it’s bad. When President Obama fails to pressure the Department of Justice to abandon its duty to defend laws he doesn’t like, it’s also bad. ...

The Wages of Wins blog has some bad news for most NBA fans: Here is an interesting factoid about the NBA Finals. Since 1978 (the first year we can calculate Wins Produced) no team has won an NBA title without one regular player (minimum 41 games played, 24.0 minutes per game) posting at least a 0.200 WP48 [Wins Produced per 48 minutes]. Only one team – the 1978-79 Seattle Super Sonics [led by Gus Williams with a 0.208 WP48] – managed to win a title without a regular player crossing the 0.250 threshold. And only four other champions didn’t have at least one player surpass the 0.300 mark. This tells us – and hopefully this is not a surprise – that to be an elite team you must have at least one elite player. ...

Change.org: Why I Choose Streets Over Shelter. A homeless person explains why one might rationally choose sleeping on the street over going to a homeless shelter. Ken Kuhl: My Weekend with the Electric Mini Cooper (Mini-e). Mini has provided a few prototypes to regular people in New York and Los Angeles to get their feedback. Matthew Yglesias: China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software. Really smart comments. China’s market power is such that they can demand concessions to authoritarian censorship that other countries cannot. However, those other countries can then take advantage of the anti-liberty “features” that were created for China’s government. Jake Tapper: Ex-Gitmo Detainee Lakhdar Boumediene Details Tortures. While in Paris covering President Obama, Jake Tapper took time to do this interview. New York Times: How the U.S. Surplus Became a Deficit. Everybody already linked to this article, but it’s a must read. Alex Moskalyuk: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Who doesn’t want to be more persuasive? Ruby Best Practices: Quack Attack: Making Your Code More Rubyish. It’s my goal to speak every programming language I use like a native. Language Log: Obama’s Imperial ‘I’: spreading the meme. The recent claims that Obama says “I” more than other Presidents is wrong. GitHub: whenever. A Ruby wrapper for cron. Tim Bray: On Carving Your Initials. More engineers should be invited to give commencement speeches. James Fallows: Departing questions. A comparison of the rendering of Beijing’s CCTV tower and what was actually built. The concept is much more impressive than the execution.

The question the world is asking today is, “Was the election result in Iran legitimate?” Juan Cole has a list of reasons why we should question the results that bears paying close attention to. And the conduct of the Iranian government in the immediate aftermath certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that they have nothing to hide. We all knew before their election that in the end, the ayatollah is the one who’s really in charge. It remains to be seen whether the Iranian people are going to do something about that. ...