I didn’t really take part, but apparently today was Run Some Old Web Browsers Day. I think my first exposure to a Web browser would have been around 1994, although the first time I could really play around with one was in a Humboldt University computer lab, I think, and that would have been 1995. Before that I was restricted to ftp and gopher, but was never that into either of them. I think I have some email from a little earlier than that.
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From the what-were-they-thinking department: the German supermarket chain Lidl has been caught spying on their employees.
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I came across a distinction in fiction recently that I don’t think I’ve paid much attention to before, and that I don’t know the word(s) (if extant) for: works in which the characters play a part in the major events that occur in their milieu during the narrative, and works in which they play no such part, but are caught up in those larger events.
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Contrary to what you might expect, this post is not a rant against Wal-Mart per se. I was prompted to write it after reading this CNN article about Wal-Mart suing a disabled woman who was an ex-employee. The summary is that she was in a bad accident, was covered by Wal-Mart health insurance for her treatment, then successfully sued the person responsible for the accident—at which point Wal-Mart sued her to recover that money, because her employment contract entitled them to recoup the money they spent on health insurance in that fashion. The CNN article raises some questions about this, but I think they’re the wrong questions.
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I haven’t finished all of it yet, but Clay Shirky’s talk on networking, organization, and the internet is quite good.
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Yeah, I don’t usually like to sound like I’m begging in my blog posts, especially when it’s not clear to entity what my request could be made. But I am, not for the first time, awash in dread that the United States is going to launch an attack on Iran.
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Tom Tomorrow is one of my favorite short-comic artists, and he really nailed it with today’s strip, “Five Years Later, Neocons Discuss Their Regrets”. The attitudes expressed by the characters in the strip are caricatures… but some of them are just stripped-down versions of obfuscatory statements major neoconservative figures have made, and one or two appear to be exactly what they are saying.
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The recent revelations that State Department contractors have been snooping through the passport records of presidential candidates, not to mention the fact that Eliot Spitzer’s purchases of sex were uncovered first by his bank and then the IRS, have highlighted the reach of the surveillance state, particularly the sheer amount of information that the government actively tracks. A recent LA Times editorial points out that purely personal privacy isn’t the real key, but rather the ability to use surveillance for political advantage—which should be pretty obvious, even more obvious given its blatant presence in the not-very-distant past.
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Continuing directly on the theme from the previous entry, author Charles Cumming has written a hypertext work that’s a fiction/Google Maps mashup: The 21 Steps.
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Since I generally side with the “snakes” in that particular conflict, I’m not a huge fan of St. Patrick’s Day… but the following rendition of “Danny Boy” is just too good not to post (even though it was on BoingBoing earlier).
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I finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance today. It’s an excellent book, covering a broad swathe of life in India during The Emergency, a period of what was essentially dictatorship form 1975 to 1977. It’s also extremely depressing.
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Apparently this is a well-known internet meme at this point, but I had somehow missed the fact that William Shatner covered Pulp’s “Common People”.
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Okay, so it’s not quite “thinking”, but it’s $150K/year to accumulate ‘interesting people’ and summaries of the zeitgeist for Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.
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When I went to see Michael Mann’s 1981 directorial debut, Thief, this evening, I was struck by the two trailers accompanying it, the original trailers for Robocop and The Terminator. (There will be spoilers for those movies in what follows, so if you somehow haven’t seen those movies yet, you probably shouldn’t read on.)
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Since last Thursday I’ve essentially been in the the grip of a compulsion to enter data into Freebase.
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The New York Times writes about the rising wave of cognitive enhancement pharmaceutical use, bringing to mind Alan Glynn’s novel The Dark Fields, which explores the territory in an interesting and disturbing way.
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It was reported last year that Admiral William Fallon, currently in charge of US Central Command, stated that he would strive to prevent an American invasion of Iran. While it’s clearly problematic to have an unelected military officer potentially refuse to carry out orders from civilian superiors, I still thought that was a small sign of hope.
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Despite having worked at Metaweb for almost a year, and despite my OCD tendencies, I had avoided getting sucked in by the allure of correcting/completing/entering data in Freebase, the web frontend to our attempt at structuring all the world’s information. I had avoided it until today, that is.
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It’s probably not surprising that I’ve never been sympathetic to displays of “patriotism”, particularly flag-waving (or lapel pins, etc.), and that I regard with suspicion any sacred cows, yes, even including the Stars and Stripes.
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Researcher Joshua Klein created a vending machine for crows.
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More than one percent of the adult population in prison. More per capita than any other nation on the planet, and more by raw numbers as well. This is the leader of the free world*?
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