Be courteous, but firm.
Category: Read
What killed the romcom? It was Love, Actually
Richard Curtis’s sexist, saccharine turkey is being recooked at a time when TV romance is far superior. May it teach filmmakers to aim higher.
Continue reading What killed the romcom? It was Love, Actually
Leftover Rice Could Make You Very Sick | Lifehacker Skillet
On a scale from “1” to “listeria” the amount of stomach trouble I would expect a bowl of rice to give me falls around a “2,” but apparently the seemingly innocuous grain can inflict a lot of pain if it’s not stored properly.
👓 Indie checkin flow | Ryan Barrett
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Update: I’ve automated this. Here’s my 2015 IndieWeb launch commitment: I’d like to be able to post indie checkins easily, both here and on Facebook. I’d like to use Faceboo…
👓 Feeling underpowered | Jeremy Cherfas
Where to begin?
This is by way of a whinge, and the solution is at least straightforward. Learn how to do what you want to be able to do, dummy.
For a good long while, I've been feeling seriously underpowered when it comes to being able to do what I want to do online. I can't really date the start of it, I just know that I am no longer able to scratch my itches as once I was. That irks me. I know there are professionals and, even more valuably, amateurs who will scratch itches very similar to mine. But they're not my itches, and I'm not scratching them.
👓 But there were people starving in China … | EatThisPodcast
… and the Romans did knead Bread Matters magazine recently linked to an interview with Jim Lahey, “inventor” of no-knead bread. I eventually tracked it down1 and gave it a listen, and on the whole it is very interesting. Two things, however, irked me. One, relatively trivial, is an idiot comme...
📗 The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
📗 Started reading The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
👓 Why Microformats? Owning My Reviews | Aaron Parecki
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)Back in October, I wrote a bunch of short mini-reviews on products and services that I use regularly. I published them all on a single page called "Favorite Things". In the past, I've written a couple of reviews on Amazon and then copied them to my website as a blog post. I decided it was time to be...
👓 Guest Post: In Praise of Globes | MathBabe
The decision by the Boston school system to replace maps of the world using the Mercator projection with maps using the Gall-Peters projection has garnered a lot of favorable press from outlets such as NPR, The Guardian, Newsweek, and many others.
👓 Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware | Motherboard
A dive into the thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking.
👓 Eagles point the way | Jeremy Cherfas
I rant regularly when people abuse Latin binomials by adding an unnecessary article in front of them, like people who refer to "the acanthomyops latipes". As I said at the time:
While I happily refer to the Skidelskys, I would never dream of calling them the Edward Skidelsky and the Robert Skidelsky. How hard is it to use a Latin name as a name?
Now I have a new term with which to beat people over the head. Thanks to a very informative article by Geoffrey K. Pullum over at Language Log (Glenn Frey and the band with the anomalous name) I now know not only that the band was called Eagles, not The Eagles, and also that such a thing -- "which takes no the" -- is called a strong proper name.
P.s. The comments on the Language Log post reveal that many bands, some of which I've even heard of, apparently have strong proper names, Talking Heads being my favourite.
Reminds me of people using the hoi polloi…
👓 Picking nits is part of the good life | Jeremy Cherfas
I started writing this back in November 2013, and put it aside until I had read the Skidelskys' book. I haven't finished yet, but ...
How strange to hear J.M. Keynes himself on the radio, telling us in his clipped tones how in 100 years time we would be eight times richer than we were then, how we would work a 15-hour week, how "Human beings would be more like the 'lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin'." A little extract of Keynes talking about his essay Economic Possiblities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930, ended Laurie Taylor's interview with Robert Skidelsky on Thinking Allowed.
I skate around economics; I'm fascinated by it, although I have no formal training, and I do see how the allocation of scarce resources is the great problem of life. I also feel, as a biologist, that so much of what passes for sound economics is astonishingly naive, no matter how complex it may seem. Bad-mouthing Malthus, for example, just seems fundamentally stupid to me. Skidelsky, as befits a biographer of Keynes, was talking about the idea of enough, rehearsing ideas from his book How Much is Enough?: Money and the good life, co-written with his son Edward Skidelsky.
👓 Analysis: Why Google has become a threat to sovereign law | Privacy Surgeon
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lashed out at Google, accusing the advertising giant of collusion with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US State Department.
Assange believes that Google has entered into a partnership with the US Administration in which the company acts as a foreign policy enabler, influencing overseas governments and helping the White House achieve its global policy objectives. In the process Google has formed strong operational and policy bonds with America’s secretive three-letter agencies that go well beyond those of other companies.
👓 Candidates for GCC board of trustees disclose campaign finances | LA Times
In the race for a seat on the Glendale Community College board of trustees, three candidates are competing for a seat to represent District 4 in the college's first district-based election.
Two of those candidates — Yvette Vartanian Davis and Rondi Werner — are nearly head-to-head in what they have raised and spent on their campaigns, so far, according to the most recent campaign disclosure statements.
District 4 represents all Glendale neighborhoods south of East Colorado Street, including Adams Hill.
👓 Fans with typewriters | Pelican Crossing
Wendy M. Grossman (pelicancrossing.net)Yesterday in Cambridge, the veteran journalist Charles Arthur held an event at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) that asked this:
Has the public been well served by technology journalism?
Arthur assembled a smart panel of long-serving folks: Andrew Brown, Carole Cadwalladr; and Ingrid Lunden. The notable thing they all had in common: none are specifically "technology journalists". Arthur first covered tennis, computing, and science. Brown made his name writing about Sweden and religious affairs. Cadwalladr is a generalist features writer for The Observer (part of the Guardian. Lunden came to TechCrunch from telecoms and art. I did The Skeptic, and began writing for computer magazines via a personal contact.