Sam's L33t Journal

Links post! Been far too long since I did one of those. Some very select stuff from the past few months:

Side Effected: A short-story film by my cousin Lev, now making the film festival circuit. Good stuff.

Daylight Savings Time is Terrible: A proposal to eliminate daylight savings time and move the continental US to two time-zones. It would certainly make working on the east coast for a west coast based company a bit more convenient.

The Turning Point in Freestyle Chess: Chess computers play at grandmaster level, but for now humans plus computers are the ultimate chess-playing team. But will that stay the case?

Barcelona as Airport Suburb: Housing prices have become so high in London that it might be cheaper to live in Barcelona and commute via Ryanair four days a week. Crazy stuff, though I wouldn't want the economic viability of my living arrangement to be dependent on the exact pricing model of a single discount airline.

The 120 Hour Workweek: An interesting experiment in productivity and self-quantification.

More Guests, Empty Houses: An article on the effect of AirBnB on housing prices in Marfa, Texas.

21 Amazing Hotels: Pretty pictures!

Sure has been a while since I did one of these, but here are a few recent tidbits.

Teach A Kid to Argue: On why teaching kids good argument skills is a better idea than you might think.

The Upside of Ugly: On plastic surgery and technological solutions to social problems.

Jay-Z’s "99 Problems," Verse 2: A Close Reading With Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps: Musical "life lessons for cops and robbers".

The Problem with Witness Testimony: One thing people should keep in mind, especially if they ever serve on a jury in a criminal trial.

The Toothbrush That Saved the ISS: Low-tech solutions in a high-tech setting.

Six Thoughts on the Case of the Breast Feeding Professor: The discussion prompted by this story is way more interesting than the story itself. Also, this.

Why Greece's Neo-Nazis Are So Popular: Not so different from other historical occurences.

Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.: Dimitri Orlov saw this coming.

The Spiritual Crisis of Zionism: A fascinating essay in response to Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism.

The Google Glass demo from Google I/O is without a doubt the most spectacular tech demo I've ever seen. Bit of behind-the-scenes footage for the demo here, part of the keynote about Glass here.

ETA: The TechCrunch writeup is also pretty good.

The dancing robot Keepon is awesome, and now you can buy one for about $40. (Hope the mass produced version has the charm of the original!)

Never has this icon been so appropriate.

Anime: Japanator's top 50 for the decade. An interesting selection. I've watched all of 22 of those and touched on 6 more.

Clothes: Ties! Also, the other kind of ties! umbrellas! Blue shoes! Double monks!

It occurs to me that I've gone from two pairs of shoes (running shoes, black oxford dress shoes; three if you include beach sandals) to seven (running shoes (which I still wear at least 95% of the time), black oxford dress shoes, cheap old wingtips, moar better wingtips, thrifted fringe loafer, cheap blue canvas sneakers (CVOs), casual slip-ons (I like the idea of using those as beach shoes much, much more than sandals, which I hate)). Basically, if I ever win the lottery I'm in danger of becoming this guy. (Not really. I hope.)

Education: Here's a method of learning phonetic alphabets (like Japanese kana): transliterate random things.

An interview with the Olin College president. I find the answers both interesting and disappointingly moderate.

A Wellesley student discusses Wellesley's admissions office's discrimination against transgendered students. Yet another "the writing is on the wall for Wellesley as women-only" story, there were several others during my Olin days. A good example of how overt, allegedly acceptable discrimination leads to covert, obviously shady discrimination.

An MIT researcher turns his house into a (self-directed) panopticon, with interesting results. I discussed this at length on my other blog.

A discussion of the World Peace Game, an educational game of global politics played by fourth graders.

Random Interesting: Broken lottery scratch-off games and their relation to security, math, and crime.'

Overthinking It analyzes Rebecca Black's "Friday", which must be the most successful vanity video of all time.

Playing video games while blind.

A bit of randomly interesting math: What is the highest value of n for which the decimal representation of 2^n has no 0s?

An article on a handbook for overthrowing dictators, which has evidently been quite influential this year.

An article on the psychology of (media) overabundance.

Better libertarian rhetoric with regard to "anti-privilege" liberals. Good stuff.

Dinosaur Comic's take on polyamory. Read the extra title text. I love that brand of subtle snark.

Open Source Software:

Went to the Olin Etherpad FAD this last weekend. (Etherpad being a popular piece of open-source collaborative document-editing software, FAD being a "Fedora Activity Day", a hackathon.) Was good, and I can increase the number of open-source projects I've added useful work to by one. Etherpad's code is a mess, though.

Ubuntu 10.10 ("Maverick Meerkat") was released on 10/10. Upgraded my home computer with no problems, upgrading my work machine now.

OpenOffice developers, not willing to take Oracle's (mis)management of the project have forked it, taking the source code and founding LibreOffice. While the process is not quite complete, I think I'll be recommending that over the old OpenOffice.org in the near future.

Open-source Facebook competitor Diaspora put out their first alpha release, demonstrating that when it comes to security, they're completely unprepared.

Finally, here's a brief post on why some of the most successful Linux-based operating systems don't mention Linux in their marketing copy.

Toxic Mudslide in Hungary:

On October 4, a reservoir containing ~700,000 cubic meters of toxic alumina sludge burst in Hungary, killing eight, injuring 123, destroying towns, and threatening local waterways. Photos here. On October 7, the sludge reached the Danube river.

A Bit of Politics:

President Obama vetoed an act requiring state and federal courts to accept notarizations done outside of their jurisdiction, due to concerns that this would facilitate foreclosures based on fraudulent mortgage papers. Several major banks have halted foreclosures in the 23 states that require some judicial process for foreclosures. Last Friday, Bank of America halted all foreclosures, they have since been joined by Goldman Sachs.

Worth watching: Stephen Colbert's in-character testimony to a congressional committee on immigrant labor. Colbert was asked to testify because he was one of the few people to participate in the United Farm Workers "Take Our Jobs" campaign.

Here's a post on the amount of corporate money being spent in the 2010 election in the wake of the Citizen's United case. I still don't think we'll see the whole impact of that case until 2012,

Finally, a post pointing out that the Republican opposition to healthcare reform basically advocates the same thing as the bill that was actually passed.

Other:

Why Groupon may be a terrible deal for small-business owners.

Two videos: Out of Sight (an animated short) and a dance from Genki Sudo (they're odd).

A list of the best Sunday brunch places near Boston, according to followers of BostonTweet.

(Home sick today, and consequently awake now because I was asleep most of the day. Will try to sleep again in a bit, but first, some links.)

Amazon vs. Macmillan: Last week, Amazon briefly stopped stocking Macmillan books when the publisher demanded the ability to set the retail price on their ebooks. Previously, Amazon paid Macmillan a fixed price for each ebook sold (same as physical books, one-half recommended retail price) and then charged customers whatever price they wanted. Amazon was selling ebooks at little to no profit (presumably as a loss leader to push Kindle sales). Macmillan was presumably worried that low ebook prices would reduce customer expectations about what books should cost. Eventually, Amazon capitulated. I think bradhicks is right on this one, Amazon was in the right, the retail price of books being set by a few publishers instead of lots of retailers is bad for customers, probably bad for authors, and certainly a dangerous trend for retailers. However, none of the authors whose blogs I read seemed to view it that way, though none of the posts in question conveyed a clear understanding of why Amazon was so panicked. Failure to communicate with authors was a large part of why the situation was a PR disaster for Amazon. But they were in a losing position either way. If they just capitulated it was likely (and even now it's possible) that other publishers would also demand to control ebook retail prices, taking a firing squad to Amazon's iPod-esque business model for the Kindle.

Obama vs. the Republicans: Did you guys see Obama's post-SOTU speech and Q+A at the Republican Retreat in Baltimore? Was pretty amazing. Wish the guy had been playing politics like this a year ago. Will he actually be able to push some Republicans into negotiating in good faith on significant policy disagreements instead of opposing everything? We'll see.

Google vs. China: How the heck did I miss talking about that one? Basically, the Chinese government's corporate espionage against Google prompted Google to reverse their earlier stance that it's better to work within the law in China than not to work within China at all. This is evidently part of a long-running internal conflict within Google. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. It's sort of interesting that large corporations now need their own foreign policy. Ultimately, I think that one was the right choice, better to take the losses now than be faced with an even worse moral dilemma later. The more entrenched Google got, the more leverage the Chinese government would have.

Bonus Videos: The best educational video on economics I've seen to date, a demonstration of the fundamentals of modern newscasting, one on traffic signals, one on B-roll, one that was the result of crazy car review show Top Gear being asked to review something practical, one on the dangers of hitchhiking.

Finally: If You Are Sleepless

Media: Seems there have been an awful lot of discussions on LJ lately that start with one author or another saying something mind-bogglingly dumb and/or offensive. The short context here: GLADD published a report on the presentation of homosexual characters on various TV channels, of those channels, only SyFy said, "Our bad, we'll try to do better in the future," johncwright flipped out, expressing rage the SyFy was cowardly submitting to pressure from a lobby that subscribes to the mantra "evil is our good" (he claimed sarcasm on that last characterization, but in a later post decried the "antinomian* agenda" of the Left). The rest was a pretty typical homophobic screed, but the responses it prompted were interesting: autopope provides a bit of context here, Hal Duncan has a dramatic and detailed response, Kip Manley has a more pointed response that hits the "antinomian" bit specifically and also has some more general commentary on the relationship between the author's views and their work, Ampersand answers a specific point of Wright's post ("What argument can be given to outlaw incest that cannot be given with even more logic to outlaw homosexuality?").

* Presumably, with "tolerance" or some-such substituted for Jesus. He was suggesting that liberals think that homosexuality is evil / perverted / wrong, but that wrong things are okay if you're a liberal. This is worth some attention, especially given that there are significant groups with an antinomian agenda in the US (the salvation by faith in salvation by faith alone types).

Politics and Economics: The White House blog has a post on how income disparity is way up (almost to its previous, just-before-the-Great-Depression high) and how "this trend must reverse". Kind of surprising to see the White House saying such things so directly. Meanwhile, the second commenter on an article saying much the same thing puts it more succinctly. There's also an interesting op-ed suggesting that a second Great Depression was averted through the power of Big Government. Kind of annoying that there will never, ever be an objective perspective on whether that's true or not, economics is way too political.

Healthcare: Nate Silver explains exactly why and how much the public option is in trouble. According to that, the key is Senate Finance committee members, because anti-public-option senators would be willing to filibuster a pro-public-option amendment, but not the whole bill. Also an interesting bit about how the GOP in 2003 supported adding the sort of care to Medicare that they're now characterizing as "death panels". Er...

Business, Airlines, Music: United has horrible customer service, which produces entertaining results.

There's been a lot of buzz around the gamer community lately about all the stuff coming out of E3. But the coolest thing, tech demo wise, seems to be Microsoft's announcement of Project Natal (like the city in Brazil), which takes the concept pioneered by the Nintendo Wii to an extreme conclusion, ditching the controller entirely in favor of advanced image processing and motion capture. (Evidently, Microsoft hired this guy as a developer, which explains a lot. Nintendo really missed an opportunity there.) Of course, I'm going to remain a bit skeptical until I see it live, since plenty of promising demos don't work out so well in real life.

While we're on that topic, here's the best review of Duke Nukem Forever I've seen yet, an excellent take on a game that revolutionized the genre and was totally worth the wait.

In more concrete matters, here's a tech demo for the system created by Kiva Systems, where Ginneh works.

Finally, in case all of the above is just too new for you, here's someone demonstrating a modem from 1964, using it to dial into a remote terminal. Surprisingly, it still works... they really don't make 'em like they used to.