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 is what really put me in awe of the man. Through a series of […]
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 behind a lot of the more open stuff: http://opendata.socrata.com/ A few interesting visualizations of […]
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 donation/membership kind of thing. After declining that I asked about a one-time donation on […]
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 continue to rise and stagger even more. I think one of the biggest realizations […]
I’ve a larger writing project afoot… putting it down to see how it looked in a different format. zen@trouble.org/2012/Draft Your most important systems are your least secure Here’s an easy one. Do you think that your most critical computers – the ones that are most important to your company’s health, wealth, and well-being – are among your most secure? If you answered yes you’re not alone in thinking so, […]