Latest on twitter:
Snake Oil?. A summary of scientific evidence for popular health supplements.
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We live in a unique time in our society: Cameras are everywhere, but we can still see them. Ten years ago, cameras were much rarer than they are today. Ten years from now, they’ll be so small, you won’t even notice them.
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If universal surveillance were the answer, lots of us would have moved to the former East Germany. If surveillance cameras were the answer, camera-happy London, with something like 500,000 of them at a cost of $700 million, would be the safest city on the planet.
We didn’t, and it isn’t, because surveillance and surveillance cameras don’t make us safer. The money spent on cameras in London, and in cities across America, could be much better spent on actual policing.
"[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
A sample from “Emily Howell”, a computer program written by David Cope to compose original music using rules extracted from extensive analysis of the works of classical composers.
Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon SimpleDB Consistency Enhancements
Contains a nice example of how this enables optimistic concurrency control. If you’re not clear on why you need to care about all this, follow the links in Choosing Consistency for background info, especially on the CAP theorem.
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Stanley Kaplan graduated No. 2 in his class at City College, and won the school’s Award for Excellence in Natural Sciences. He wanted to be a doctor, and he applied to five medical schools, confident that he would be accepted. To his shock, he was rejected by every single one. Medical schools did not take public colleges like City College seriously. More important, in the forties there was a limit to how many Jews they were willing to accept. “The term meritocracy—or success based on merit rather than heritage, wealth, or social status?wasn?t even coined yet,” Kaplan writes, “and the methods of selecting students based on talent, not privilege, were still evolving.”
That’s why Stanley Kaplan was always pained by those who thought that what went on in his basement was somehow subversive. He loved the S.A.T. He thought that the test gave people like him the best chance of overcoming discrimination. As he saw it, he was simply giving the middle-class students of Brooklyn the same shot at a bright future that their counterparts in the private schools of Manhattan had. In 1983, after years of hostility, the College Board invited him to speak at its annual convention. It was one of the highlights of Kaplan’s life. “Never, in my wildest dreams,” he began, “did I ever think I’d be speaking to you here today.”
The truth is, however, that Stanley Kaplan was wrong. What he did in his basement was subversive. The S.A.T. was designed as an abstract intellectual tool. It never occurred to its makers that aptitude was a social matter: that what people were capable of was affected by what they knew, and what they knew was affected by what they were taught, and what they were taught was affected by the industry of their teachers and parents. And if what the S.A.T. was measuring, in no small part, was the industry of teachers and parents, then what did it mean? Stanley Kaplan may have loved the S.A.T. But when he stood up and recited “boo, boo, boo, square root of two,” he killed it.
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"Monotony is the dual of modelessness in an interface. ln a modeless interface, a given user gesture has one and only one result: Gesture g always results in action a. However, there is nothing to prevent a second gesture, h, from also resulting in action a. A monotonous interface is one in which any desired result has only one means by which it may be invoked: Action a is invoked by gesture g and in no other way. An interface that is completely modeless and monotonous has a one-to-one correspondence between cause (commands) and effect (actions). The more monotony an interface has for a given task space, the easier it is for the user to develop automaticity, which, after all, is fostered by not having to make decisions about what method to use."
Sonic Boom Meets Sun Dog. Worth watching if you haven’t seen it already.
Wheelchair on the go featured in today’s Philly Inquirer. Nice work, Tom!
"Beer helps to prevent cancer and heart disease. Milk helps to cause cancer and heart disease. Beer helps to prevent Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Milk helps to cause Alzheimer’s and Dementia. If, after reading this, you still think that milk is good for you, you might consider the possibility that Dementia has already set in. Wipe that mustache off your face and put on a smile instead… have a pint of beer today. I plan to; in fact, I think I’ll go crack a cold one right now."
BBC Internet Blog: A new global visual language for the BBC's digital services
Nothing revolutionary or surprising here, I just love well-done style guides.
Fraktur Mon Amour, 2nd Edition | Book Review | Typographica. “Porn bible style” compendium of blackletter faces.
"Normally, at this point, I would simply disqualify Kingston as a vendor, but I’m more persistent than that. It’s disconcerting that a high-profile, established brand would stand behind such irregular components. Who is to say SanDisk or Samsung wouldn’t do the same? […] I decided to do more digging to try and find ground truth."
On MicroSD Problems « bunnie’s blog. Set aside a few minutes to read the whole thing, it’s worth it.
