Yostivanich

The Many-Worlds FAQ.

“Start­ing Mon­day, issues dat­ing back to 2000 will be avail­able at Data.gov in a form known in the Web world as XML, which allows users to trans­port data from a Web site and store it, reor­ga­nize it or cus­tomize it else­where. Offi­cials sug­gested that the move puts read­ers, rather than the gov­ern­ment, in charge of decid­ing how to access the Register’s reams of information. ”

“Of course, that’s not even close to true. Cur­ley and Murdoch’s macho out­rage is cal­cu­lated to be quotable, but it is fake. Here’s why: go to Google News, or type a newsy topic like “Obama wins Nobel” into Google’s search box. What do you get? Head­lines and very brief teasers link­ing to news sto­ries from news sites. If you click on them, you are taken to that news site, where you can read the story, which is sur­rounded by that site’s ads. What, exactly, did Google steal in this sce­nario? If you don’t click on the link, you don’t see the story. If you do click on the link, you see the story on the originator’s Web site. Instead of steal­ing, I would call this some­thing else: a free ser­vice that dri­ves lots of read­ers to news Web sites that wouldn’t get nearly as much traf­fic, if any at all, if Google didn’t link to their sites for free. That may not be as pithy as cry­ing “thief!” But it has the advan­tage of being true.”

“The pur­pose of this site is to cap­ture the crazy but true com­ments said to birthing women by doc­tors, mid­wives, doulas, lac­ta­tion con­sul­tants, and child­birth edu­ca­tors when they are hav­ing their babies!” Some pretty hor­rific stuff in here.

“To biol­o­gists and oth­ers, it is a source of amaze­ment and embar­rass­ment that many Amer­i­cans repu­di­ate Darwin’s the­ory and that some even espouse counter­theories like cre­ation­ism or intel­li­gent design. How can such will­ful igno­rance thrive in today’s seas of knowl­edge? In the hope of dimin­ish­ing such obscu­ran­tism, the pro­lific Eng­lish biol­ogy writer Richard Dawkins has devoted his lat­est book to demon­strat­ing the explana­tory power of evo­lu­tion­ary ideas while ham­mer­ing the cre­ation­ists at every turn.”

“Remov­able heads and under­ground exhi­bi­tions are just two of the guer­rilla tac­tics the Gao broth­ers have employed, often with the help of Melanie Ouyang, their bro­ker, to enable fans and friends to view their work. The Gaos are part of a gen­er­a­tion of avant-garde Chi­nese artists who are push­ing the bound­aries of artis­tic expres­sion. In the increas­ingly open Chi­nese art world, nudity is com­mon­place where it used to be for­bid­den, and art par­o­dy­ing the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion has become so ubiq­ui­tous that it is passé. Still, the Gaos are a reminder that, espe­cially as China cel­e­brates the 60^th anniver­sary of the Com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion, lim­its to expres­sion remain: although artists are increas­ingly free to deal with social and polit­i­cal top­ics, works that explic­itly crit­i­cize Chi­nese lead­ers or sym­bols of China are still out of bounds.”

“The nearly 600km-wide rock is an exam­ple of an object that started out on the process of becom­ing a planet but never grew up into the real thing.”

“At their August 2009 meet­ing, the National Coun­cil for Exam­in­ers of Engi­neer­ing and Sur­vey­ing (NCEES) Board of Direc­tors approved mov­ing for­ward with the devel­op­ment of a Prin­ci­ples and Prac­tice of Engi­neer­ing (PE) exam for the dis­ci­pline of SOFTWARE ENGINEERING. As part of the Board action, it was agreed that IEEE-USA will serve as the lead tech­ni­cal soci­ety spon­sor­ing the exam­i­na­tion with coop­er­a­tive agree­ments from other orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the IEEE-Computer Soci­ety, the National Soci­ety of Pro­fes­sional Engi­neers (NSPE), and the Texas Board of Pro­fes­sional Engi­neers (TBPE).” Weirdly they don’t list ACM as one of the par­tic­i­pat­ing organizations.

“In this tuto­r­ial we are going to cre­ate a pure jQuery & CSS twit­ter ticker which uti­lizes Twitter’s Search API. It will show your or your friends’ lat­est tweets, and will not require any server side code or data­bases. As a result, the ticker will be eas­ily included into any web page and eas­ily mod­i­fied to your likings.”

“Log­i­cal fal­lac­ies when try­ing to teach log­i­cal fal­lac­ies. Thank you, book.” Fun stuff.

“CouchDB joins other offline appli­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies such as Google Gears and Adobe AIR (Adobe Inte­grated Run­time). The main dif­fer­ence between CouchDB and a tech­nol­ogy such as Gears is CouchDB offers the same appli­ca­tion code run­ning on the server and locally, Ander­son said. Nor­mally, devel­op­ers have a lot of work to do to make an appli­ca­tion run offline, he said.”

“Good luck try­ing to find an Inter­net user who admits to respond­ing to spam. Still, they’re out there, and in pretty good num­bers. Accord­ing to a new report, a full 12 per­cent of Inter­net users have actu­ally wanted to pay for some prod­uct or ser­vice being adver­tised by e-mail.”

“Oppo­nents of same-sex mar­riage reject it on reli­gious and moral grounds but also on prac­ti­cal ones. If we let homo­sex­u­als marry, they believe, a parade of hor­ri­bles will follow—the weak­en­ing of mar­riage as an insti­tu­tion, chil­dren at increased risk of bro­ken homes, the even­tual legal­iza­tion of polygamy, and who knows what all. But with the exper­i­ment loom­ing, some oppo­nents seem to be doubt­ing their own con­vic­tions. But I have a strong sus­pi­cion that both sides of the debate are right. The sup­port­ers of same-sex mar­riage are right in pre­dict­ing that it will have no bad side effects. And the oppo­nents are right not to make predictions.”

“The 802.11n tech­nol­ogy, as it is known, was rat­i­fied by the IEEE, a body that over­sees all wi-fi stan­dards. All exist­ing draft 802.11n wi-fi prod­ucts will work with the final stan­dard, accord­ing to the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group that tests wire­less prod­ucts to ensure compliance.”

“Doc­tors, by a large major­ity, sup­port adding a gov­ern­ment run health insur­ance pro­gram that would com­pete with pri­vate insur­ance. That’s accord­ing to a new sur­vey. What’s been called the pub­lic option con­tin­ues to be one of the most con­tentious issues in the health care debate, but the sur­vey shows that doc­tors are already used to deal­ing with gov­ern­ment run insurance.”

If it doesn’t get posted on the blog does it get seen?

“The Supreme Court refused on Mon­day to block the release of doc­u­ments gen­er­ated by law­suits against priests in Con­necti­cut for alleged sex­ual abuse. Sev­eral news­pa­pers are seek­ing the release of more than 12,000 pages from 23 law­suits against six priests.”

“Thou­sands of gay and les­bian activists are march­ing through Wash­ing­ton to demand greater civil rights. The protest is tak­ing place a day after Pres­i­dent Barack Obama said he would repeal a ban on gay peo­ple serv­ing openly in the mil­i­tary. The marchers in Wash­ing­ton are also call­ing for the speedy removal of legal restric­tions on same-sex part­ner­ships. Mr Obama has been accused by some in the gay com­mu­nity of being slow to act on gay rights.”

“LibraryThing’s sys­tems admin­is­tra­tor, John Dal­ton, came up with this—using LibraryThing’s tag­mash fea­ture to demon­strate the dif­fer­ence between geeks and nerds:”