July 2007
Microwaving common household objects →
Eggs and Christmas Lights are my personal favorites.
Deep packet inspection: the new wave of internet... →
A very well-written primer on deep packet inspection, a complex process that analyzes the content of each quanta of information flitting across a network and then does things based on that content. It’s a huge step up from previous hardware that just analyzed the most superficial information about each chunklet (source, destination, target port), and gives the network owner much more power...
Save the Republican YouTube Debate! →
That’s my friend Josh Hersh in the upper-right corner, and he’s a really smart and interesting guy.
Making a Hard-Life Story Open a Door to College →
A workshop to help inner-city high-school students write great essays expressing their childhood experiences for college applications.
David Lynch Interview/Profile →
“Only make new mistakes.”
– Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, at the WP-centric Wordcamp conference
BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT →
Comes out December 18th with loads of extras.
The 12 Kinds of Ads →
The 7th format example was directed by Errol Morris, who specializes in those types of direct testimonials. Oh, and he makes badass documentaries on the side.
Poems that double as Inform 7 Code →
Inform 7 is a program and language-spec used to make text-adventures like Zork (e.g. “walk north; open door; light match” etc.). Here are poems in English that compile into short text-adventures using Inform 7. Hofstadter would be proud.
If Clicks Were Votes - Democratic Candidates →
While most internet polls can be tilted by forum invasions, etc., this is a per-state analysis of which Democratic presidential candidates received the most website traffic. The same site has a similar analysis of Republican presidential candidates.
Hypothetical questions they should ask at the... →
The much-vaunted CNN-YouTube Democratic debate is tomorrow, and these would be awesome. See also these odd questions as well as these really-submitted but totally awful YouTube questions.
Juvenile sex offender registries are a bad idea →
Long, but a fantastic overview of the issue as well as a very persuasive argument against many tactics currently used in treatment and the law.
Ron Paul profile in the NY Times Magazine →
He’s a fringe candidate on the Republican side, but the internet seems to be unhealthily infatuated with him for being libertarian. :(
“Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular,...”
– An excerpt from the book Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk
An infographic of intimate relationships →
It’s way too awkward to be a genuinely great brevity-enhancing infographic, but it’s a fascinating attempt at a rather hard problem.
Appaholic's Viral Dashboard: a readout of the... →
“A news story should be like a mini skirt on a pretty woman. Long enough to cover...”
– Best. Journalism Quotes. Ever. - Public Eye
Facebook Acquires Parakey →
The co-founders of Parakey also worked a lot on firefox, and Joe Hewitt in particular developed the must-have Firefox web-development extension Firebug.
On the proto-genre of "superhero literary fiction" →
The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay is sitting on my bookshelf, but I haven’t summoned up the will and time to even glance at the first page. Infinite Jest takes precedence.
FBI's Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made... →
As a sidenote, I didn’t realize that Wired’s article-reading interface was so much improved in the recent redesign. It’s curiously close to The NY Times’ one, but being similar to rawesome is never a crime.
“Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the...”
– The Open Library’s boast. The Institute for the Future of the Book has an interesting take on the project.
“I’ve noticed recently that the concept of what we might call designed...”
– Subtraction: Designed Deterioration
Novel Faiths Find Followers Among Russia's... →
In the vacuum created by post-Soviet Russia loosening previously-strict laws governing religion, the region has seen thousands of sects flower, with beliefs widely varying.
In Mississippi, Ruling Is Seen as Racial Split -... →
It’s an odd political scenario, one where I’m not quite sure what the motivations are on all sides.
Internet Archive: September 11 Television Archive →
Live TV from that day. For example, here’s ABC’s Good Morning America with its first mention of attack. The comments there talk about how far into the clip the first mention appears, so ignore them if you want to be surprised by it. Sidenote: are morning news/variety digests always this awkward?
Cultural vs. Economic Populists: An Interesting... →
“According to a study by Alan Sorensen at Stanford University, “In 1994,...”
– Harry Potter and the Death of Reading - washingtonpost.com
Subtraction: The YouTube Aesthetic →
YouTube Aesthetic as populist spin on cinema verite
Ironic Sans: Terrorist organization logos →
“There’s a room in the Musée d’Orsay that I call the “room of...”
– Harriet: a blog from the poetry foundation
Man arrested, goes to court after rampage in... →
I guess he really hates cell-phone towers.
The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism... →
Incidentally, why all the rhetoric-centered understandings of terrorism that I’ve seen to date are necessarily incomplete.
