Category: philosophy
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jesus fuxing christ
Some tool at firefox, which I’ve started using more with more web dev (<3 firebug), decided it’d be a good idea to switch windows if you type in a URL that is already open. Unbelievable that they think this is good UI practice (switching focus invisibly to another fucking monitor is progress?) And having no…
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Thanks, peter
Peter Neumann introduced me to another Peter, the author of this delightful lil’ missive below. Thanks P^2. [5] Elias, P., “Two famous papers” (Editorial), Sep. 1958, p. 99. TWO FAMOUS PAPERS PETER ELIAS It is common in editorials to discuss matters of general policy and not specific research. But the two papers I would like…
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the umbrella man
Or… sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. I’ve long had an admiration for errol morris, a filmmaker who seems to just keep getting better (I hate him too!) – his The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara was (and is) just a marvel. But his writing for the NYT…
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go .gov!
In 2009 the US government (thanks to Obama) did a remarkable thing by releasing a ton (perhaps a Library of Congress worth of tons) of data: http://explore.data.gov/ Much of the data is in CSV/JSON/XLS/etc formats. The Seattle gov has done similar local data efforts, much through the same underlying architecture: http://data.seattle.gov/ Socrata seems to be…
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Standing outside a broken volunteer with money in my hand
So I’m walking down the street and get stopped by an effervescent volunteer who claims to come from UNICEF. Now… come on, who doesn’t like unicef? All around good people who have done good things for kids for a long time, as far as I can tell. But they/she was pressing for a $x per month…
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Bruce, prisons, justice, GhD
Thanks go out to bruce schneier for pointing out this article in the New Yorker* about the american prison, process, and justice (sic) system. (Below, by adam gopnik.) It’s important, and worth reading (has a great opening line as well.) I’ve spoken, written and read before about the appalling situation of this system; the numbers…