Guy Kawasaki wraps up a set of photos of the 25th anniversary party for the members of the original Macintosh team with the following: I hope that everyone gets at least one chance to work on such a great project with such great people as the Macintosh Division. Unlikely. But we can dream.
Arnold Kling deciphers two contrary outlooks on the economic stimulus package. One from Kevin Murphy and another from Brad DeLong. It’s a great, short look at competing economic philosophies, and why there’s such difference of opinion regarding the stimulus package. I don’t agree with Kling’s conclusion, but his explanation is very much worth reading. One of Murphy’s key criticisms of fiscal stimulus is that to some degree, it will pull private resources into the public sphere, where they will most likely be allocated less efficiently. As unemployment rises, the degree to which this will occur shrinks. Given that companies announced over 68,000 layoffs just today, these concerns would appear to be diminishing. ...
Boston Globe: An American take on al-Jazeera. Really interesting recounting of how al-Jazeera has covered the war in Gaza. I feel strongly that if American war coverage was less sanitized, support for military action would go down. Rick DeNatale: Database Representation for Recurring Events. I’d love to see more micro-case studies of data modeling problems. Marginal Revolution: Worry less about releasing terrorists. An economist’s view of releasing terrorists. Errol Morris: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. Long interview with wire service photo editors on iconic photos of President Bush. clicktoflash. WebKit plug-in to prevent automatic loading of Adobe Flash content. Riding Rails: Nested Model Forms. Improvements in this area have been desperately needed.
The USS Mariner (a baseball blog) has as good a short explanation of where blogs trail newspapers and other outlets in terms of what they can provide. The topic in this case is sports, but it holds up for other topics as well: I’m (obviously) a huge proponent of blog coverage, but there’s no way it fills the gap of a major paper. We don’t get press access. We can’t go talk to Wakamatsu or anyone on the team unless we know them personally. We don’t have the ability to spend eight hours interviewing people about a breaking issue and turning around something insightful for the next day. The research and analysis done here or on Lookout Landing or anywhere is done essentially for free (well, not Lookout Landing, obviously, as they get to bathe in a hot tub of Kos’ money every night). There’s a lot you can’t do as a writer when your budget is zero. ...
Matthew Yglesias: The Thunder and the Laughter, the Last Thing They Remember. A list of the idiotic assertions about shutting down Guantanamo that people who want to keep it are putting out there. The Washington Monthly: There Are No Files. There are no formal case files for any of the detainees at Gitmo. The United States has held hundreds of prisoners for years without charging them with crimes, and never even bothered to put together evidence for eventual prosecutions. More here. LA Times: News organizations concerned about access issues at the Obama White House. Media outlets are trying to put a stop to anonymous background briefings from White House staffers and pushing for on the record comments. 12 Standard Screen Patterns. Handy resource. Integrity. A slick looking continuous integration server for Ruby on Rails applications. Hoptoad and Exceptional are both subscription-based services that log exceptions from Rails applications. Rands In Repose: The Larry Test. On being done.
Magnus Holm: When in Doubt, Turn to _why. A comparison of different algorithms for parsing nested parameters from a query string in Ruby. Very educational. Waxy.org: Pirating the 2009 Oscars. Andy Baio’s annual report on which Oscar-nominated films are available via file sharing. This year’s list is larger than ever. WoW Insider: Ezra Wheathoof is Thunder Bluff’s newest Elder. Ezra Chatterton was a young World of Warcraft player who died of cancer. Blizzard continues to memorialize him in the game. New York Times: Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers. This is fascinating but I don’t really know what to make of it. John Resig: OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript. Walkthrough of a GreaseMonkey script that solves one relatively weak CAPTCHA implementation. Put this in the “I didn’t know you could do that in JavaScript” file.
I watched Slumdog Millionaire last night. Some people had said it was overrated, but Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes indicate that most people loved it. Roger Ebert gave it about as good a review as he ever gives any movie. Anyone going into the movie should go in with the thought that while the circumstances faced by the characters are realistic (and at times difficult to watch), the plot is somewhat fantastical. I think a lot of people who came out disappointed did so because they didn’t expect a fairy tale. ...
I’ve switched over to Disqus for comments. Let me know if you hate it. Update: I changed my mind. I’m going to dig into some other options that provide features I’m interested in without taking over the whole comment system.
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok both lay out their alternatives to massive fiscal stimulus today. Both argue along roughly the same lines – play defense and wait for the measures already taken to work. Tyler also helpfully quoted Warren Buffett’s argument for stimulus yesterday. It’s important to remember in this argument that nobody really knows what’s going to work and economists are relying on the philosophies that have gotten them this far. The main line of argument right now seems to be over the consequences if the policy we pursue misses the mark. Is it worse to not pursue fiscal stimulus and find that we really needed it or is it worse to run up a big deficit and find that doing so was insufficient to address the crisis? ...
I’m going back to packaging up my del.icio.us bookmarks daily and posting them here. The Black Triangle is an article from 2004 about game development found by Jason Kottke. It describes the disconnect between programmers and users, where users are unimpressed by seeing something relatively simple on the screen, and developers are thrilled at the huge amount of work that into getting that simple thing onto the screen. I’ve found it’s never a good idea to show customers the Black Triangle. It always comes later in the process than they’d think and often freaks them out. waferbaby: The Setup. Interviews with people about their computer setups. I can never read enough of these. New York Times: Gazan Doctor and Peace Advocate Loses 3 Daughters to Israeli Fire and Asks Why. The horrific cost of war. Dr. Saturday: Australian Rules’ blood’s worth bottling. A proposed playoff structure for college football. A more interesting approach Going.com: Newspapers Covering Obama’s Inauguration. A huge collection of newspaper front pages from President Obama’s inauguration. And yes, it still feels weird to type “President Obama.” CSS Newbie: The EqualHeights jQuery Plugin. I’m always looking for better ways to set columns to equal heights on a Web page. Glenn Greenwald: Mohammed Jawad and Obama’s efforts to suspend military commissions. When anyone questions whether the United States tortures people or tortures the wrong people, you can forward them the story of Mohammed Jawad, a teenager captured in Afghanistan who was coerced to confess to killing US soldiers with a grenade. The military prosecutor in his case petitioned that he should be released and ultimately resigned rather than prosecute him.