There’s a fun little video called What We Call the News (JibJab), which lampoons the state of American media today, which has degenerated from “anchors of integrity and three channels to choose” to “a ratings race, with the anchors replaced by blondes with big, fake boobs”. To be fair, it’s not these superficial qualities that form the crux of the problem—Lou Dobbs, for example, is neither blonde nor especially busty. But he exemplifies the problem with the news with his shocking incompetence and... [More]

This guy kicked off a [a] better design to fit a year calendar comfortably within a business card. (ELZR) There are a lot of, shall we say, unique, entries. Many of them are interesting only in that they actually work, not that they would be more useful than the standard pocket calendar, which uses text too small to read. The winning entry is the Thumb Calendar by Adam Sporka, which is clean and clear:

Here’s how it works:

First half of the year is on one side of the card, the rest of the year is on the other.... [More]

The International Photography Contest (National Geographic) selected the following picture as the winner in the Animals category of their annual competition. This is wrong on so many levels, not least of which is that a lot of people (yours truly included) tend to have much stronger reactions to the suffering of animals that fellow human beings. Why is that? Is it their helplessness? Their relative innocence? Are people not accorded a similar guilelessness, by default? Or do we just assume that they, while not... [More]

Fast Food Restaurants & Nutrition Facts Compared (A Calorie Counter) took the time to painstakingly combine the published nutrition (if you can call it that) information for the largest fast food chains in America.

A few tidbits:

• In the french fries department, Dairy Queen at 1530mg delivers almost five times the sodium of McDonald’s fries and 730 kCal for their large size.
• Carl’s Jr weighs in with a regular hamburger that has 470 kCal and 1060mg of sodium.
• The unlimited weight class for sandwiches/burgers has... [More]

The Writer’s Guild started their strike this week, bringing all new television production out of Hollywood to a screeching halt. For those who haven’t followed it too closely, the Guild have put together a video covering the main points.

Why We Fight (YouTube)

Another member of the guild involved in the negotiation wrote Why We Want Our Words’ Worth by Michael Winship (Common Dreams), which noted that much of what is breathlessly reported by the media is vastly distorted or flat-out incorrect—pretty much par for the course for the new channels,... [More]

As cities in America grow bigger and bigger, with suburbs being surrounded by exurbs and people travelling around, through and between city centers regularly, the question of public transportation arises. It’s only really in the States that large cities look at public transportation as a question rather than as a right. It’s only in the States that trains, subways, light rail and metro commuter lines are discussed in terms of profitability instead of usefulness, environmental friendliness and... [More]

The Congress spent the weekend proving, once again, that they have no idea what the safe word is in the sub/dom game they’ve been playing with the executive branch since early 2001. And, despite the title of this article, Hillary Clinton Votes for War — Again by David Bromwich (Common Dreams), it’s not just Hillary grinning madly around the ball gag, either: she’s joined by 75 close friends in the Senate who also saw fit to approve the following language[1]:

“…that it should be the policy of the United States to stop inside... [More]”

Often quoted by the now-silent Billmon in response to stunningly undetstatements offered by politicians at large. The most recent spate come from the king of rhetoric, George Bush II, S = r * t (My Alter Ego Speaks) cites him: “I do know that we have not succeeded as fast as we wanted to succeed”, with other variations being “I thought we would succeed quicker than we did” and “I am disappointed by... [More]”

Statetris is Tetris, but with countries or states/counties. You can choose from the following difficulty levels:

• Easy – States/countries are labeled and already rotated to the correct position.
• Medium – States/countries are labeled and are rotated to a random position.
• Hard – States/countries are not labeled and are rotated to a random position.

Some of the countries are really small and must simply be placed into one of the magnifying glasses. It’s a pity that they don’t leave the... [More]

Played by Hugh Grant; the quote is twice as good when you hear him deliver it.

On the subject of the suspiciously quiet home front in the war on terror, there’s Things I Used to Know by Scott Adams (Dilbert Blog):

“We Americans know that Al Qaeda has cells in America planning to attack. And we know that there are more terrorists than ever, thanks to the Iraq war. It’s easy to get people and explosives into the country on private boats or across our porous borders. The woods must be full of terrorists by now. Apparently all the slow ones came to America. I mean, Iraq has almost as many car bombs as... [More]”

Every once in a while, there’s something on Slashdot worth reading. More often than not, it’s in a comment rather than one of their “articles” (quotes intended to convey ample contempt for the editing process there). There’s a discussion there, High Court Trims Whistleblower Rights (Slashdot), in which one participant got pretty shrill in responding to a troll[1], trotting out all of the arguments that trolls dearly love to feed on (as well as those ever-delectable tears of frustration and rage).

Some... [More]

The application tar is ubiquitous in the Unix/Linux world. It rolls multiple files and directories into a single “tarball”, which can be transferred more easily and expanded at its destination. A single option, -z applies a compression to the resulting tarball, giving the file the by now well-known extension .tar.gz (for tar-balled and g-zipped). Extracting this file involves two operations, in which first the compression is removed and then the tarball unrolled.

The easiest way to back up a... [More]

“OOP without generics is like a car that only turns left – sure you can go right, just take three lefts.”

Googlewhacking—finding a search combination that returned exactly one hit—used to be all the rage, with some people devoting astonishing amounts of time to it, only to report it on a blog, have Google index it, immediately invalidating it (because now there are two results). Below is one that I stumbled on recently:

Googlewhack May

At the time (May 12th, 2007), it returned exactly one result and, amazingly, has stood the test of time, returning only one relevant result today (as shown below):

Googlewhack July
... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

Trillian is a multi-protocol chat client that’s been around for a quite a while, with both a free version and a professional version, which includes extra features and support. Their version has stagnated quite significantly, offering a grand total of one update over the last three years or so. The feature set is robust and it does pretty much everything you need from a chat client, but its look and feel... [More]

What is a terrorist? A terrorist, according to the dictionary, is someone who kills or destroys in an attempt to exert political influence. According to the media and almost all of America’s politicians and police forces, it’s pretty much anyone who’s ever had a seditious thought. Ever. And why is every one of these potential terrorists treated like the most capable evil mastermind to ever walk the earth? A thirty second sound byte is usually more than enough to show that the person (or people)... [More]

The release of Safari for Windows seems to be the only issue worth discussing for most of the technology world. Whether it’s the horrific zero-day exploits (already patched, but still a rocky start), the crashing bookmarks for non-US English-speaking users or the ridiculous amount of effort put into making Safari exactly the same on Windows as it is on OS X—including all controls (scrollbars, buttons, etc.), behavior (can only resize from the bottom-left) and, last but not least, the... [More]

The following 3-minute video shows US traffic patterns as they ebb and flow throughout the day. The data is from March of this year and is real, spiking from a low of about 4000 flights to over 16,000 flights in the air at peak travel periods. There are so many that the flight paths actually acurately delineate the shape of the continental United States.

Found on US Air Traffic by Brad DeLong (Grasping Reality with Both Hands).

Or “Benito Giuliani”, if you prefer. That’s how he was known to the denizens of the fair city over which he ruled with an iron fist, using and abusing his beloved black-booted police squads to do so. It’s this same Rudy Giuliani—former mayor of New York City and proud owner of an elaborate back tattoo depicting himself holding a bullhorn, an American flag and a New York hot dog while simultaneously digging a fireman out of the rubble of the World Trade Center on which he stands, illuminated... [More]

Keeping it short and sweet, Discrimination by Scott Adams throws out a few observations on paradoxes in our society’s of valid and invalid prejudice. For example, though most prejudices aganst traits people can’t control are regulated, “it’s totally legal for an employer to reject a stupid person” who applies for a job. To the hypothetical argument that this is a worthwhile exception, he retorts:

“You might argue that it is in society’s overwhelming best interest to discriminate against stupid people because... [More]”

Lucky Stars (Time) is an interview with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Ellen Barkin and Matt Damon. The interviewees literally have no interest in promoting the movie, unless you count them parading their hilarious camaraderie that undoubtedly features heavily in the film as promotion. At any rate, it seemed incidental to just having a whale of a time.

The first question asked them how they kept their cool and turned out a quailty product—according to general opinion, the best of the series— instead... [More]

Khalilzad replaced John Bolton as the American ambassador to the United Nations.

The article, What Do States Owe The Exonerated? (Plastic), poses an interesting question. Almost everyone will have a knee-jerk reaction to it—evincing either a gut feeling that an exonerated prisoner is an innocent man and therefore has been treated unfairly by society or a kneejerk reaction that anyone who the courts saw fit to send to jail must be guilty in one way or another. There are those who view every exoneration as the result of a sly criminal’s—and a liberal lawyer’s—machinations of our... [More]