February 2012
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Canadian Muslim Who Sends Text Urging His...
Boing Boing points us to the crazy story of Saad Allami, a sales manager in Quebec — who is Muslim — who sent a text message to some colleagues heading to New York for a trade show, in which he encouraged them to “blow away” the competition. He (quite reasonably) says that he was trying to “pump up” his staff. However, apparently Canadian law enforcement...
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Major Label-Owned Vevo Caught Publicly Streaming...
Where’s ICE when you need them? For a while now, ICE has been making the case that sites that merely link to streaming content — especially sports content — are the most evil kinds of criminals around. It’s why they’re trying to extradite Richard O’Dwyer from the UK to have him face criminal charges. It’s why they recently arrested Yonjo Quiroa, who...
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Park Ranger Tases Guy Walking Dogs Without A Leash
In the latest example of questionable taser use, a man walking his two dogs off-leash at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area was tased in the back by a park ranger, who was apparently trying to make an example of him. The problem was that the guy, Gary Hesterberg, was walking the dogs at Rancho Corral de Tierra, which used to be an off-leash walking area until it was just recently...
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What you think matters
Julie Posetti, on Twitter, asks if you could write a letter to your 15-year-old self, what would you say. It took about five minutes to remember that I had an answer ready. And I would send the message to all 15-year-olds, not just me. It’s really simple.
What you think matters.
At age 56, I wish someone would send me a letter, today, that says that. I’m always having to...
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February 10, 2012
Here’s hoping this makes sense! Oh, and books are back in stock! from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (updated daily)
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I was cutting out some foamboard for a...
I was cutting out some foamboard for a client.
Client: No no no! We need three right arrows and two left arrows! Not the other way around!
I turned one of the extra left arrows 180 degrees.
Client: How’d you do that?
from Clients From Hell
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Art Installation Turns Frosty Winterscape Into...
This is a ridiculously simple art installation, but the optical effects are pretty extraordinary. Japanese artist Toshihiko Shibuya slapped some candy-colored paint on a set of iron disks, then planted them in the snow on variously sized rods, the painted side face down. When the sky clears, the snow in Hokkaido appears so bright and pure, it reflects the disks’ colors promiscuously. From far...
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WebGL around the net, 9 February 2012
Gosh, it’s been a while! The link backlog got out of control over January, so I’ve had to declare link bankruptcy… so here’s the stuff I’ve heard about over email since then, new stuff coming next week.
From the people who wrote glslunit, a GLSL Minifier — useful for speeding up your page downloads and adding a bit of protection to your source code. There’s a demo page too.
Ehsan Akhgari:...
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Architects Propose “Bibs” To Shield NYC From...
Global warming will make New York spectacularly vulnerable to flooding. Some researchers even suggest that in 200 years, Manhattan could look like Venice. Does that mean 8 million people oughta start packing their bags? Of course not. But experts agree the city should do something. Enter Tingwei Xu and Xie Zhang. The U Penn students think New York can protect itself the way a guy cracking lobster...
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Full scale, fully operational 3D printed car.
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This Line Is Engaged
(I am calling my girlfriend, deciding on whether to grab dinner together tomorrow.)
Me: “I’ll give you a ring when my classes end.”
Girlfriend: “You’ll give me a… ring?”
Me: “Er, I’ll call you.”
from Funny & Unusual Romantic & Love Stories - Not Always Romantic
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Cinnabonkers For Cinnamon
(Airport | Boston, MA, USA) (There is a flight leaving our airport over an hour later than expected. My department is trying to re-direct passengers to other connecting flights, or reschedule flights they may miss because of the delay. An Irish woman, around 50, approaches the counter.)
Me: “I apologize for the delay. How can I help you?”
Customer: “Hello, young man. I must say this delayed...
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Reimagining CBC TV
I came across this video today of someone’s suggestion for CBC. In a nutshell: stop broadcasting on TV and move entirely online.
While I love this idea and think it’s perfectly the right direction for any television studio or network to go, I can’t help thinking about rural Canada’s under served Internet service. It’s 2012 now and there are lots of places in Canada still using dial-up because...
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OneNote for Android
I am a big time user of Microsoft OneNote and for a long time I have synced with a USB HDD as well as my SkyDrive. Having one note on the SkyDrive meant that I could sync with my Windows Phone as well as my desktop, notebook and netbook. Now I find that Microsoft has now released a version of OneNote for Android devices. Download OneNote for Android from the Marketplace. As of February 7, OneNote...
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Can We Count The Ways In Which Lowe's 'License...
First, let me say that I occasionally do shop at Lowe’s, but not that often. There is one literally across the street from my office, so it’s easy to stop by after work — but my office is a good 25-minute drive away, so if I just need stuff on weekends, there are about six Home Depots that are much, much closer. Lowe’s also feels oddly sterile, whereas Home Depot has the...
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starbucks labels drinks with the "chink...
Oh, man. Not this again. Recent racist incidents involving employees at Chick-Fil-A (“CHING CHONG”) and Papa John’s Pizza (“Lady Chinky Eyes”) have had me checking my receipts lately. Some ignorant-ass joker could be mocking you right in front of your face. But hey, why use words for your favorite racial slurs when you can draw them?
Last month at a Starbucks Coffee...
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True Stuff: Intellectual property Part 2! Foreign...
Yesterday I shared a bit about the debate raging in the 1870s Congress about whether the federal government had the ability to oversee trademarks. (It did, then it didn’t, then it kind of did, then, eventually, it totally did.)
Another major intellectual property debate of the nineteenth century was regarding foreign copyright laws and treaties. It was common in that time for British books to...
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Show HN: My MusicHackDay project. A MPC-esque JS...
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Self-Perception Theory and Marketing through...
I recently found out, via this article on Mindhacks.com, about an interesting paper by researcher Jeremy Bailenson in The Psychologist.1 In it, he reviews recent research on how viewing online representations of ourselves –like our avatars on the Xbox 360 or our Miis on the Nintendo Wii– can affect our behavior. He talks some about modeling healthy behavior and implanting false memories, but to me...
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If “Back to the Future” Was Made Today…
Click the image to see it at full size.
This poster’s been making the rounds on the internet today. I found it here.
I saw Back to the Future in the theatre at the age of 17. I was 14 for most of 1982 (yeah, yeah, I’m old), so that was a formative time.
Here’s one of the big singles of that year:
Late Night with David Letterman debuted that year. Here’s Dave with one of his most difficult...
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Check My Colours
Developers often write tests to make sure their code is working properly, and designers should be thinking along the same lines.
It’s difficult to test aesthetics, but with tools like Spur App you can make sure that your design looks good for people with color blindness and other mild vision impairments. You can also make sure that your design has enough contrast and feels...
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Robot readable world
found footage from machine-vision tests
from Waxy.org Links
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The Fireplace Delusion
It seems to me that many nonbelievers have forgotten—or never knew—what it is like to suffer an unhappy collision with scientific rationality. We are open to good evidence and sound argument as a matter of principle, and are generally willing to follow wherever they may lead. Certain of us have made careers out of bemoaning the failure of religious people to adopt this same attitude.
...
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February 06, 2012
OH SHNIZZLE IT’S A NEW SEASON OF SMBC THEATER. from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (updated daily)
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Gutters: Issue #251 - Mike DeCarlo
(sigh) Fine, I’ll pretend I’m not still reeling from the Superbowl, and talk about Watchmen 2.
Or, “-1” as it were.
Before Watchmen is a go as I’m sure you’ve all heard. The executives, the creators involved, the usual talking heads and of course, the internet have all chimed in. I’ve heard all the talk, seen the preview art and read the articles and...
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phantom menace in 3d
this is obviously a complete fiction
there is no lucasfilm star wars complaints department
from chainsawsuit by kris straub
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Using max-width on images can make them disappear...
I recently ran into a problem that was really hard to figure out. I was working on a responsive design where I used img {max-width:100%;} to make sure that images would be downsized rather than overflow in narrower viewports.
It worked great everywhere… until I went to check in IE8. The site’s logo was gone! None of the usual IE bug fixes cured the problem, and it took me quite a while to...
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Piston Camping for Fun and Profit
Digging through the archives on my computer, I unearthed this old gem. It’s probably my first example of videogame analysis
Some background: This is an article talking about the level CTF-Facing Worlds in the game Unreal Tournment. It was a horribly broken, unbalanced map with a layout that encouraged all the wrong behavior from players. Despite this (or perhaps even because of it) CTF-Face was...
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Things that cannot screen for breast cancer, and...
Via Lian Amaris who is also on Twitter and is evidently my kinda person.
For more context, visit Greg’s. The TL;DR: Susan G. Komen For The Cure caved recently to anti-choice activists and has stopped giving money to Planned Parenthood who, you know, actually does screening for breast cancer. As well as pap smear screenings for cervical cancer. And abortions for patients who need to undergo...
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Support our Troops Unless…
RBB experiences even more controversy.
“Support our Troops” in a saying that I personally don’t like. I just am not a big bumper sticker person, though I do have one simple U.S. Army star stuck to my car expressly for the purpose of getting out of the occasional speeding ticket. While I do agree with the sentiment behind “Supporting the Troops,” I think that it is used far too often in common...
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Good Tools Have Verb-Based Interfaces
I’ve switched to an iPhone as my primary mobile device because I’m dogfooding my new iOS app. Coming off of three straight years of Android, one of the toughest parts of the transition was losing the applications drawer. My new iPhone had so many screens of icons, all perfectly aligned in a grid, every one with rounded corners, all equal visual weight, nary a widget in site! I got...
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Masticatory No(Tc)hes
For as long as I can remember I’ve been an excited consumer of the efforts made by scientists to popularize their research and findings. This mainly translates to their TV documentaries made for the layman.* Nothing wrong with that. They’re usually greatly entertaining and filled with made up stories designed to illustrate a point and keep Joe everyaudience interested. They do however have a...
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A Massively-Multiplayer Mashup of PubNub and...
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A house designed like a web application
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Narcissism has higher health costs for men
A fascinating but not entirely surprising result from a study about narcissism suggests that men incur a higher cost health-wise for trying to appear manly, or otherwise in conformity with stereotypical gender roles.
For the new study, Konrath and colleagues David Reinhard of the University of Virginia, and William Lopez and Heather Cameron of the University of Michigan examined the role of...
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Study: Poor thinking skills and...
Via Jezebel, sometimes science isn’t just good for improving humanity’s lot in this universe, or improving (or drastically reducing) our overall life expectancy as a species. Sometimes science is also excellent at coming along and sciencing you up the perfect blog post.
As it turns out, pretty much everything you’ve suspected about conservatism and racism being correlated with being...
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Why are software development task estimations...
nice piece of Quora fiction [via]
from Waxy.org Links
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ScratchML
markup language for recording and replaying turntablism
from Waxy.org Links
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Yahoo lays off in-house Flickr support team
from what I hear, it was done with 10 minutes’ notice to Flickr management
from Waxy.org Links
January 2012
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Are Design Patterns an Anti-pattern?
Design patterns are generally considered a good thing, but do they actually help run a user experience group? As a user experience group manager and an observer (and sponsor) of design pattern exercises, I’ve come to have serious questions about their actual utility. It’s not that design pattern libraries are bad, but that in a world of limited resources, it is it is not clear that the investment...
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UK Court Says You Can Copyright The Basic Idea Of...
We’ve talked a lot in the past about the “idea/expression dichotomy.” This is an important concept in copyright law that says you can only copyright the specific expression, and not the idea. This is supposed to protect people from getting accused of copyright infringement for basically making something similar to what someone else made. Unfortunately, as we’ve been...
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A Sci-Fi Garden Where Visitors Help Grow A Greener...
In some ways, H.O.R.T.U.S. feels like any other greenhouse. It has the usual phalanx of wide-spectrum light strips overhead and sunlight pouring into the windows and fresh oxygen pumping through in the air. It’s just missing one thing: actual plants.
Instead, 325 transparent “photobioreactor” bags—enclosed vessels for producing biomass—dangle off the ceiling and incubate nine...
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Pope calls for silence against Internet noise
The Pope would like all of us bloggers to shut the fuck up.
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday hailed the benefits of silent reflection to stop being “bombarded” by information from the Internet but said social networks could be useful modes of communication.
“People today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were...
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TMI On The VJ, Toots
(Retail | Louisiana, USA) (An elderly woman approaches my counter at work.)
Customer: “Excuse me, young man, but is your grandfather’s name Sean?”
Me: “No, ma’am, why do you ask?”
Customer: “You look just like the sailor I celebrated VJ Day with!” *winks*
from Funny & Stupid Customer Stories - Not Always Right
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EC2 for Poets in 2012
Three years ago, I wrote a tutorial called EC2 for Poets that made it relatively easy for a technically proficient user to set up a Windows server in Amazon EC2. A few hundred people tried it, and were able to get servers running. They could install apps, and run web apps that they then could access from home or on the road. Having your own server “up there” can be pretty cool, makes a...
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Deadly bullshit therapy kills Quebec woman
We don’t often talk about it (since we usually have bigger fish to fry), but alternative therapies can be just as dangerous as any other form of superstitious. Most often, the danger in these therapies lies in the fact that “patients” often favor these pseudo-scientific treatments to the real deal, and end up paying for it later. Comedian Andy Kaufman, when diagnosed with cancer, spend his hard...
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Narrative isn’t usually content either
When I said that narrative was not a game mechanic, but rather a form of feedback, I was getting at the core point that chunks of story are generally doled out as a reward for accomplishing a particular task. And games fundamentally, are about completing tasks — reaching for goals, be they self-imposed (as in all the forms of free-form play or paideia, as Caillois put it in Man, Play and Games)...
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Rugby Film Highlights the Erosion of Women’s...
Women in Iran have it rough. This wasn’t always the case – at least, not the way it is today. Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, most Iranian women didn’t wear veils. They were active in high levels of academia and government, so much so that even the conservative Revolution couldn’t completely erase their involvement. The civil law protected women’s rights, even when it contravened Sharia law...
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Why Developers Hate Antiviruses
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